MK Bhadrakumar

Former Ambassador

Centred across the face-off between US President Trump and the WHO, the developments of the previous fortnight maintain signposts for Indian diplomacy. The annual session of the World Well being Meeting (WHA) final week (Could 18-19), the WHO’s policy-making plenary, witnessed the face-off taking the type of a morality play — theatrical leisure and allegory with ethical attributes prompting viewers to make selections.

For South Block, all of it started with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s videoconference with a clutch of like-minded counterparts handpicked from Asia, West Asia and the western hemisphere — ‘Quad’ plus South Korea, Israel and Brazil — to debate the ‘transparency and accountability in combating the Covid-19 pandemic and in addressing its causes’ and for ‘reaffirming the significance of the rules-based worldwide order’.

This adopted Trump’s announcement to freeze US funding for the WHO for its refusal guilty China for the outbreak. Trump alleged that the WHO promoted China’s ‘disinformation’. Pompeo proclaimed, ‘The rule of legislation, transparency, and accountability would be the key to our shared success.’ Delhi’s function on this sordid episode stays obscure, however the folly of making misperceptions of India lending its shoulders to the US to snipe at China and the WHO can’t be understated. Pompeo hoped to mitigate the US isolation on the eve of the WHA, as international considerations over the pandemic started crystallising. Frankly, Pompeo’s enterprise was none of India’s enterprise.

Within the occasion, China performed a lead function within the negotiations on the WHA to forge a consensus amongst 194 member-countries and grow to be one of many co-sponsors of the decision that was lastly adopted. Over 100 nations fashioned a coalition to give you the draft decision. The thrust of the decision was in its stirring name to stop discrimination and smearing campaigns and to take measures to counter disinformation (learn ‘Wuhan virus’); implement a multi-sector motion plan in strengthening the well being programs of the member-countries in opposition to the pandemic; and work collaboratively to develop and scale up efficient and reasonably priced diagnostics, therapeutics, medication and vaccines. Merely put, Washington’s push for a so-called impartial investigation into China over the outbreak fizzled out. And India, as so typically on the subject of China, missed the woods for the bushes.

In his deal with to the WHA — Trump refused to attend the digital assembly — Chinese language President Xi Jinping pledged a $2 billion contribution over the following two years to assist growing nations address Covid-19 — and, importantly, he dedicated that vaccines developed by China can be made ‘accessible and reasonably priced’ to growing nations. This final half is of essential significance to India.

Trump has refused to make any such pledge on international accessibility or affordability of any vaccine being developed within the US. Delhi ought to have absolute readability of thoughts right here, for India is not any stranger to the predatory commerce practices of western pharma firms.

However the WHA has been a watershed occasion for different causes, too. It not solely debunked the ‘Wuhan virus’ thesis, but additionally the worldwide neighborhood realises that Trump’s motives are self-centred — to divert consideration from his personal incompetence in combating the pandemic, which threatens to be the leitmotif of the presidential election in November. Even the US’ European allies perceive why within the midst of a world disaster, American international coverage is absorbed with China’s actions initially of the outbreak, reasonably than a world effort to comprise and finally finish it.

The 27-member EU backed the WHA decision. The paradox is: The US had largely led the world into the present international system, however no nation is ready in the present day to observe America out of it. In impact, the US is abandoning multilateralism as the one option to halt its decline and diminishing international dominance. On this momentous debate, the place does India stand, because it swears by multilateralism because the beacon mild of its international coverage? Looking back, India shouldn’t have had any truck with Pompeo’s six-nation ginger group.

Fortuitously, India’s election to the WHO’s 34-member Government Board and of minister Harsh Vardhan’s selection as its rotating chairman for the following 12 months presents us with a contemporary begin. The guts of the matter is that Covid-19 poses a giant problem to India, but additionally poses an awesome alternative on the political degree.

To date, Exterior Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has been the navigator of our ‘pandemic diplomacy’. He made a couple of telephone calls and distributed some hydroxychloroquine and Panadol tablets to some nations. That lacklustre part has been a disappointment. The federal government’s priorities have since turned, rightly so, to expatriate evacuation operations. However there’s a ‘massive image’ that should not be overlooked.

The pandemic highlights the imperatives of South-South cooperation, which was a key template of India’s diplomacy until we deserted the growing nations and hitched our wagons to the Washington Consensus. It took a pandemic, lastly, to compel our elites to shake off their reveries and witness the sorrows of tens of millions of countrymen entrapped in a lifetime of poverty, and hark again to India’s ingrained habitat.

Vardhan’s advisory function within the WHO is well definable. China could be a pure ally for him, offered he’s allowed such latitude by South Block whose pivot to Washington complicates India-China relations and brings no dividends because the nation enters a harmful interval with the virus stepping out of metropolises to stalk our huge undefended countryside.