Top of His Game

After Atal Bihari Vajpayee resolved a half-century of animosity with China on a state visit to Beijing last month, the Indian Prime Minister's traveling press pack tried valiantly to find some balancing spin. Settling a dispute over India's eastern border with Tibet was all well and good, said a reporter at a press conference in Beijing, but what about India's most famous foreign resident, the Dalai Lama? A junior correspondent queried whether the aging Prime Minister would be around to complete New Delhi's rapprochement with Beijing. Another contrasted China's soaring economic progress with India's bureaucracy-bound growth. Vajpayee held up his hands...