New Delhi on warm spring days is very attractive, with bright flowers and bushes. Although capital of the world's second-largest country, with more than a billion people, it has more open spaces and public parks than most cities, writes Martin Mansergh.
The long vista from Indiagate to the Presidential Palace witnesses a military parade each January 25th. That was the date in 1930 when the Indian National Congress declared independence. Like other former British possessions, such as the United States and Ireland, the proclaiming of independence is honoured, rather than the final acceptance of it accompanied by withdrawal, marked in India's case by a ceremony at the Red Fort on August 14th-15th, 1947.
There is a large memorial park, where everyone can pay their respects to the towering figures of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and grandson, Rajiv, three prime ministers. Tragically, all except Nehru were assassinated.
Parts of the Mahatma's philosophy are similar to de Valera's. Gandhi said in 1942: "Man falls from the pursuit of plain living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants."
Nehru was a moderniser. His letters from prison to Indira in the 1930s, published as Glimpses of World History, contain three chapters narrating Ireland's quest for national independence. He was critical, though understanding, of the tendency of oppressed and struggling countries to seek solace in bygone greatness.
Nehru wanted to rid India of the shackles of the past that prevented its free development, while not cutting off completely from a great cultural inheritance stretching back to the dawn of history. The difference in situations was that Britain never seriously attempted the impossible task of anglicising India.
Leafy suburbs are home not merely to a spacious and well-guarded embassy quarter, but a number of think-tanks, including the Delhi Policy Group, which, inviting experts from different fields, aims to develop new thinking and broader perspectives on policy issues confronting India.
Last Friday and Saturday, it held a seminar, Developing Durable Peace Processes and Partners. Its purpose was to illuminate problems in India-Pakistan relations, with comparative perspectives from the Middle East and Northern Ireland.
Programme director Radha Kumar formerly a visiting senior fellow with the US Council on Foreign Relations, has just published her book on the Indian sub-continent, Making Peace with Partition.
The partition of India in 1947, and the de facto partition of Kashmir, were described as "irretrievable" by a serving Indian minister at the conference opening. Nonetheless, they remain a source of profound regret among India's political and intellectual elite. Even with partition, the newly independent state of India still faced the enormous challenge of governing a vast land and peoples of tremendous diversity in a spirit of pluralism and democracy, trying to restrain the tendency of one group to try to dominate another. There is no other country like it.
The Mughal rulers of the 16th and 17th centuries, buried in magnificent mosques, like Humayan's tomb in Delhi, took Hindu brides. Gandhi strove with all his might to prevent partition, in part the fruit of British policy. Churchill, who helped precipitate Ireland's Civil War, remarked in 1940, before becoming prime minister, that he regarded "the Hindu-Muslim feud as the bulwark of British rule in India". Fear of majority rule, not sufficiently allayed, also played its part.
Partition can create more problems than it solves. In 1947, according to Radha Kumar, between half a million and a million people died in a communal holocaust, and 15 million people were forced from their homes in wholesale ethnic cleansing. The behaviour of Jinnah and the Muslim League was no more inspiring than that of Carson and the Protestant churches in the North (1912-14) vis-à-vis Home Rule. Peter Hart, in the current issue of History Ireland, describes the latter as "not a pretty picture" and "one of the big untold stories of this period". Nehru's promise of a plebiscite for Kashmir was not fulfilled.
There have been bloody wars since in the Indian sub-continent, with Pakistan described even by some of its own as "a garrison state", which needs border tensions to justify military rule. Constant complaints are made by India that Pakistan and Bangladesh have surreptitiously assisted terrorism in Indian border states or taken insufficient steps to prevent it.
An annual cricket match in the past three years and a new bus service across the Line of Control in Kashmir, already subjected to terrorist attack, are deemed important confidence-building measures.
The introductory conference notes observed perceptively of the current state of the Northern Ireland peace process: "Incidences of violence are so infrequent as to cause a storm of protest when they do occur." One participant noted that, while, during what is now regarded as a successfully concluded peace process in South Africa, 20,000 people died between 1990 and 1994, in Northern Ireland any violent act is apt to be treated as the death of the peace process.
Having come so far, the imperative is to conclude, rather than abandon it. Gerry Adams's Wednesday speech, which read like a commander-in-chief's address to the troops, would indicate some intellectual acceptance at least of the necessities of the situation.
Solutions canvassed for the Indian sub-continent include circumventing absolute ideals of sovereignty, better regional economic co-operation, and perhaps a special status for Kashmir. Political conflict is not helping economic advancement of the region, though India is now progressing well.
Like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II has been one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century. It is hard to think of any Pope who had a greater positive impact on their age, as a catalyst in Eastern Europe's delivery from totalitarianism. Despite important gaps and issues that may have to be urgently addressed anew by his successor, his life achievements and personal outreach are honoured by people of all faiths and none.