Rajiv Lochan

“भय बिनु प्रीत न होय गोपाला” (there is no love or affection without fear)

You would have noticed the sudden onset of humanitarian concern in the Biden Administration for India. All of a sudden America is once again full of love and affection for the Indian people. This is not the result of Indian Americans or Kamala Harris putting pressure on old man Biden and his team of defense experts. This is the result of India, for once, using the danda (baton) on America.

It wasn’t Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who talked to the Americans. It were the officials of the ministries who did the talking. The American administration that is used to whimpering Indians and fawning Indians rapidly evaluated the import of what was being told to them, quickly reverted to being humanitarians, and revoked the order to ban the supply of vaccine manufacturing raw material to India.

What happened was this: while the Liberal and Left vultures in India were gloating over the news of the American ban and remembering the secularism and socialism of Nehru, things were moving.

Modi was certainly no Nehru. His ministers, who had never had been educated at Harvard or Cambridge, were not prone to being in awe of the Christian white man.

They quietly informed the Biden Administration that this was not the India of Nehru and Indira and Rajiv any more. This was a different India.

The Biden Administration was told that American companies will have to fulfil their contractual obligations. And that any administrative interference in that contractual obligation in the name of defence of America would result in an equal and opposite reaction from India. Biden’s officials were informed by Indian officials that India would immediately stop the export of phospholipids that were manufactured by VAV Lipids, an Indian company, based in India, manufacturing in India, using Indian raw material. Without these phospholipids the American vaccine manufacturers would be completely crippled.

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Rajiv Lochan is a distinguished scholar, historian and columnist