NEW DELHI: India, long credited with a complex, broad-range diplomatic agenda and a range of skills within its relatively well-trained and polished diplomatic corps, is showing signs of extreme immaturity, paranoia, and dreadful diffidence over the violence in western Gujarat state.

Nearly 10 weeks after the ethnic-religious violence erupted on Feb 28, the Gujarat situation remains abnormal and extremely tense. Its refugee camps swell with over 100,000 people, mostly Muslims.

The death toll in what is now called India’s worst state-sponsored pogrom of an ethnic minority since independence has touched 900, according to the government. It may be 2,000 or more, according to NGOs.

The severity and persistence of the carnage has caused consternation all over the world, especially because of well-documented reports of the Gujarat government’s direct sponsorship of the massacre.

It has also impelled numerous states, whose citizens of Gujarat origin have been affected, to express their concern and criticism.

But New Delhi has responded by accusing foreign missions of “interfering” in India’s “internal affairs”. It has repeatedly warned foreign diplomats against using the Indian media to air their views and peevishly objected to expressions of concern by visiting dignitaries from Finland, Canada and Denmark.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) strenuously denies that the Gujarat situation is grim, that the state has failed to act impartially to protect the citizens’ life and limb, and that the continuing, alarming breakdown of law and order calls for exceptional corrective steps.

The MEA has gone to absurd lengths in this denial strategy. First, it trashed reports that the European Union issued a demarche on Gujarat on Apr. 23. It indulged in hair-splitting distinctions between a demarche and “mutual consultation” and made much of the fact that the EU’s demarche, issued discreetly in Madrid, was verbal.

This convinced nobody. The European Union was reported to have issued a second demarche, based on a report prepared by the embassies of its member states in India, according to the ‘Financial Times’. This report says the Gujarat violence “was not spontaneous but a pre-planned policy involving state ministers to purge Muslims and destroy their economy”.

Similarly, reports from groups that have looked closer into it says the incident that preceded the violence, the burning alive of 59 Hindus in a train coach on Feb 27 in Godhra, did not trigger the anti-Muslim pogrom. The Godhra episode was no more than a “pretext” for the “Hindu mobs’ violence, which was planned months before”.

The EU’s conclusions are in line with the findings of a number of Indian citizens’ groups and international organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The MEA strenuously denies such reports. On May 2, it physically refused to accept a paper detailing the EU’s position, which EU officials were trying to hand over to the Indian delegation at a bi-annual ”summit” in New Delhi.

This is perhaps the most childish diplomatic misdemeanour ever on India’s part. It involves a breach of the Vienna convention on diplomatic conduct, which allows any state to issue a demarche (a diplomatic initiative vis-‘-vis another state), by expressing its concern orally or in writing, with or without soliciting a response.

New Delhi’s extraordinarily peevish response to perfectly legitimate expressions of concern cannot be squared up with the fact that it has voluntarily signed and ratified any number of international treaties, conventions and covenants on human rights, civil and political rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion — which were violated in Gujarat.

“This means that a foreign government’s demarche on Gujarat cannot be considered ‘interference’ in India’s internal affairs”, says Muchkund Dubey, a former foreign secretary with extensive experience of multilateral diplomacy.

The Indian government’s prickliness over Gujarat can only be explained by the deep involvement in that pogrom of the Hindu Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads New Delhi’s 25-party ruling coalition, headed by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The Gujarat carnage is a gross violation of India’s secular Constitution. It involves the destruction of the integrity and impartiality of the state and an assault on pluralism and tolerance.b —Dawn/InterPress Service.