"But I leave with very grave concerns."He made constant reference to the need for a political solution, not just a police operation to weed out armed Albanian extremists. But he chose not to refer to the fact that many of the victims of a police blitz in Drenica last weekend, in which more than 20 people were killed, had been tortured and gunned down in cold blood without any evidence being produced of their involvement in subversive activities.Instead, he repeatedly said that Europe could not condone terrorist activities - a perfectly respectable line taken in context, but one that was snapped up by the state media in Belgrade as a partial vindication of the police operations.The Serbian authorities insisted that their actions were targeted specifically at suspected strongholds of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army - the shady armed group that has taken responsibility for a string of killings of Serb policemen and Albanian "collaborators" over the past year.One village that was shelled and set on fire, Prekaze, has often been mentioned as a centre of anti-Serb activism. Sources at the moderate Albanian-language newspaper said that information they were receiving from the area suggested the death toll could run to several dozen people.Albanians and Serbs have begun to leave Kosovo in recent days for fear of further bloodshed. Albanian reports said that women and children from the Drenica area were trying to escape the conflict on tractors, but that Serb police on the roads were forcing them to go back.This renewed outburst of police repression was little short of a humiliation for Mr Cook, who had hoped to talk Mr Milosevic into starting a dialogue about greater autonomy for Kosovo with the province's moderate Albanian leadership. Instead Mr Cook, who was acting on behalf of the European Union, found himself powerless to threaten Mr Milosevic with anything worse than a continuation of Yugoslavia's diplomatic isolation.

The attack made a mockery of efforts by Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, to pressure the Serbs into halting their repression. While Mr Cook was in Belgrade preaching the need for dialogue and respect of human rights to both Albanian leaders and the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, special police units were ripping, apparently indiscriminately, through Albanian villages in Kosovo's Drenica region under the pretext of carrying out an anti-terrorist dragnet operation. Details of the violence were sketchy and casualties were impossible to estimate accurately because the area was completely sealed off by security forces, but by late afternoon the wounded and dead had begun arriving at hospitals in the provincial capital, Pristina. SERBIAN police attacked more than a dozen Albanian villages with artillery fire and helicopter gunships in a sharp escalation of violence in the Albanian-dominated province of Kosovo yesterday. He faces national elections in September with his troops in complete disarray.. With regional elections approaching, the Bavarian Prime Minister, Edmund Stoiber, is keen to exploit the anti-European sentiments of his voters.For Chancellor Kohl, whose wobbly coalition fell apart and suffered a rare defeat in Parliament yesterday, the bitter row with Munich could not have come at a worse time.

Otherwise, the Bavarian government says it will oppose the ratification of the Treaty in the German federal chamber, the Bundesrat. Bonn has three weeks to comply.The Bavarians cannot stall on the treaty for ever, but can cause severe political damage to the federal government. Munich has asked Bonn to intercede on its behalf by attaching a protocol to Treaty spelling out Bavaria's position. The government in Munich wants to impose special rules, requiring proof from immigrants that they have a job and health insurance in Bavaria. The real purpose of such a measure is to discourage foreigners from even trying.These proposed rules are not aimed at Third World asylum-seekers. They will eventually find it almost impossible to enter the EU. Munich is concerned with itinerant East Europeans who have gained a foothold in the community and might be tempted to wander into prosperous Bavaria.The new restrictions would be against the spirit as well as the letter of the Amsterdam Treaty, which seeks to encourage the free movement of people within Fortress Europe.

These included Mr Scindia's ancestor, Mahadji Scindia.After an introduction like this I felt obliged to give Mr Scindia a very hard time about the disgusting state of his constituency, and I was lucky not to be thrown out of the car.. EUROSCEPTIC Bavaria opened a second front yesterday in its ongoing war with Brussels, demanding an opt-out from European Union-wide immigration rules. In an unprecedented ultimatum, the Bavarian government threatened to vote against the Amsterdam Treaty unless it was given licence to bar non- EU nationals who are legally resident in another EU member state. The agreement signed by European leaders in Amsterdam last year called for an EU-wide regime on immigration. Britain and Ireland opted-out from some of its provisions, while Germany had led the group of nations pushing for common rules.But the Bavarians, who are bitterly opposed to all aspects of European integration, including monetary union, have their own ideas for welcoming foreigners.

I learned this from the Maharaja of Gwalior himself, Madhravao Scindia, the sitting MP, a Congress leader and possible future prime minister. Last week when he was out campaigning for re-election I talked my way into his Ambassador and presented my card He did a double take. "The only person in history who ever stormed Gwalior Fort was a Major Popham," he told me. "Are you by any chance related?"This, I surmised, must have been my old Uncle William who with Warren Hastings cut a bloody swathe through central India in the 1770s. In 1780, with a force of 30 men, Popham somehow scaled the sheer walls and sent the inhabitants packing. to learn and profit by." The anti- Muslim street violence of nationalists in Ayodhya and Bombay shows they have not lost touch with their roots, and one hopes that in government the BJP will be too hamstrung by their coalition partners to behave like good fascists.A couple of hundred kilometres up the road from Khajuraho is the former princely state of Gwalior, dominated by a massive sandstone escarpment 300ft high, "the pearl among the fortresses of Hind" as Babur, the first Mogul emperor, described it.The fort looks unassailable, but on one occasion a small force did succeed in scaling its walls.