Indians are acutely conscious that, on this subject, the Chinese are easily offended.

Were they worried about offending the Bush administration?

The prime example of disaggregation is the Nord Stream pipeline, which appeals to Germany while angering Poland and the Baltic countries.

His sermons fill football stadiums and he has won a Nobel Prize, but political leaders around the world shirk from meeting him openly, for fear of offending China.

But Sarkozy s view that the European Central Bank should be subject to political engineering upset Germany, his visit to Moscow, because Germany felt that it was being circumvented.

And China, when it took a 10 stake in the US private equity group Blackstone, eschewed any voting rights in the company s management, perhaps as a way of keeping US financial regulators happy.

While Putin's press secretary commented October 28 that the Russian president was aware if not in control of the investigation into Umarali's death, Tajikistan's President Emomali Rakhmon has not mentioned the issue at all, perhaps at risk of angering patron Russia or inflaming hostility towards the country's tiny Russian minority.