Daily Archive: June 18, 2013

Continued from Part 1

So, where, or what, precisely was this Indian ‘unity’? To find the elusive answer to this question we need to return to Nehru who, despite his inspiring romanticism, provided us the clue in the following passage (1946: 343) the essence of which is that Indian Unity is essentially a ‘middle class’ yearning. He said: “The rising middle classes … wanted some cultural roots to cling on to, something that gave them assurance of their own worth, something that would reduce the sense of frustration and humiliation that foreign conquest and rule had produced”.

(Admiral Leighton W Smith USN, C in C US Navy Europe and NATO and Allied Forces Southern Europe (1994-6) – who with his staff had prepared a military briefing on Bosnia for Holbrooke, the chief US envoy to Yugoslavia(1995+)

I always think of this excerpt whenever I read Dayan Jayathileke (DJ). Coincidentally Holbrooke US Ambassador to Germany, Assistant Secretary of State and head of the US negotiating team at the Dayton Peace talks wanted to ‘bomb for peace’.