Obviously, the failed Ayodhya negotiation is still rankling Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. For today in front of the global ‘Dialogue Among Civilisations’ gathering, he rubbed in the point that ‘‘the culture of dialogue’’ is needed at the national level to resolve contentious issues as much as it is required in international fora to reduce conflicts.Vajpayee’s comments seemed to be directed at delegates from 40 countries as well as the local audience. He said: ‘‘I must emphasis that we also need the culture of dialogue at national level, so that contentious issues can be resolved through talks. Dialogue is an essential part of democracy. The more a nation can harmonise differences at home, the greater will be its ability to contribute to a dialogue at the international level.’’ Pakistan raises Kashmir bogey again, MEA mum NEW DELHI: As feared by the HRD Ministry, Pakistan did rake up the Kashmir issue at today’s session of the ‘Dialogue Among Civilisations’. And, it went a step further by indirectly accusing the Vajpayee Government of encouraging a ‘‘culture of conflict’’ between faiths for electoral gains and foreign policy advancement. The one-man Pakistan delegation — Education Minister Shafqat Ezdi Shah — through his provocative speech at the tail-end of today’s Dialogue, had the Indian side fuming and looking for an honourable excuse. ‘‘The state must ensure that a culture of conflict between adherents of different faiths is not encouraged for electoral gains or political power. Fears of clash among civilisations are not used to advance narrow foreign policy objectives and geo-strategic ambitions. State power projections should not be based on the capacity to cause death and destruction,’’ he said. No official from the Ministry of External Affairs was available today to tackle Pakistan’s expected onslaught which came wrapped in advice. (ENS) Advocating broader dialogue among nations, Vajpayee said: ‘‘We should not confuse civilisation with history. For the history of nations and mankind are as much a list of conflicts and wars as of that of progress.’’He advised participants from Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan, Africa and Latin America: ‘‘The greater the understanding, the stronger is the cooperation and goodwill among nations. And the stronger is the cooperation and goodwill, the lesser is the need to spend huge resources on arms and military strategies.’’The modern man, he said, has been so numbed by daily news of violence around the world and destruction of environment. ‘‘After the horrible wars of the last century, the continuing ethnic clashes in some parts of the world, and the emergence in recent times of terrorism that misuses the name of religion, he is not swayed by claims ‘my country right or wrong’; ‘my people greatest in history’; ‘my faith the only faith’’’.Union HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, who is co-hosting the two-day Delhi Dialogue among Civilisations with UNESCO, set the agenda of the Delhi Dialogue by saying, which could be contradictory to the Sangh’s and his own party’s agenda,: ‘‘Dialogue must aim at excluding exclusivism and it must promote inclusiveness. And yet inclusiveness should avoid the mistake of imposing uniformity in the world.’’He, however, added: ‘‘Due to the recent advances in certain branches of science, we have now entered into a new worldview which emphasises that at a deep and fundamental level, the separate parts of the Universe are connected in an intimate and immediate way. This leads to the realisation of unbroken wholeness which denies the divisions and fragmentation.’’In the inaugural session, Rajya Sabha member and India’s UNESCO representative L.M. Singhvi read out from the president’s rather cryptic message which said when a large part of the world’s children suffer from poverty, they neither know of any dialogue nor care about civilisation. Lending his support to the meet, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said that there was need to promote free diversity and reduction of intolerance for peace to have a chance in the world.The ministers from participating nations presented their papers today. And tomorrow has been kept aside for a closed-door discussion at which the members will put together a future roadmap in the form of a ‘Delhi Declaration’.
