Instructing the Pandavas on his deathbed, the patriarch of the Mahabharata, Bhishma, told them that a basic tenet of statecraft is that for a kind 'No one is his friend, no one his enemy. Circumstances make enemies and friends' (Cover illustration). This axiom was formulated millennia before Lord Palmerston's oft-quoted one-that states do not have permanent friends or permanent enemies but only permanent interests-became conventional wisdom. ...
