No winners

The Narendra Modi visa episode is a classic example of Roger de Coverley's languid observation "Much, my dear, can be said on both sides."

When wounded national pride is pitted against the exercise of a sovereign right, the resulting babel can be embarrassing for the neutral observer.

Thus, while no one can deny that the US has a perfectly legitimate right to decide who will cross its borders""India does, too, and could deny a visa to, say, Donald Rumsfeld for authorising torture in Iraq?""it is also perfectly true that such discretion must not be exercised quite as crudely as has become the Bush administration's SOP.

The fact is that whatever may be his other blemishes, Mr Modi is an officer of the Indian Constitution. As such he deserves the usual courtesies that sovereign powers extend to each other.

This is what the government of India has pointed out and quite rightly too. As the Americans like to say, it's pure business, nothing personal.

Of course the US government is right in saying that this is a matter between it and Mr Modi, and does not involve anyone or anything else, such as the Gujarati community or Indo-US relations.

But then why make an example of him now and not earlier? Indeed, why make an example only of him and not all the other public officials from a host of other countries who have been similarly accused of abridging religious freedoms? That the US has applied double standards is clear enough from this.

But then again, an important attribute of official discretion is to adopt multiple standards. If the same standard were to be applied to everyone, what would be the raison d'etre of official discretion?

That said, it is tiresome to see Mr Modi doing his injured innocence act. Everyone knows what he did, and caused to be done""first in the riots and then in the matter of bringing the culprits to book.

Nor has anyone forgotten what the then prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, called those horrific riots: a national shame. The evidence of government complicity in the pogrom against the Muslims is too voluminous to be ignored.

Police officials' mobile telephone records (unearthed recently by a newspaper) tell their own story, and civil servants from the state privately admit that word was put out to teach the Muslims a "lesson".

So when Mr Modi does the victim act he lacks conviction, and in some eyes looks idiotic. In other eyes, though, he might have got fresh vindication""and the US decision may therefore be of help to him politically, especially since he was facing a challenge from his own party colleagues in the state.

Nevertheless, Mr Modi does not know the meaning of a dignified silence. That, at least, is one thing he can learn from Sonia Gandhi.

The issue, in the end, boils down to resolving a conflict between two rights. This is always harder than resolving a conflict between two wrongs.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Conversely, two rights can make a wrong. Faced with these situations, philosophers have recommended a sensible course of action: stop fussing and get on with more important things.