Public health diplomacy in Indian history:

Therz been much talk about India-manufactured vaccines being shipped to some countries. As an ordinary Indian I tend to agree with folks who think this is in line with the Indian state's good-on-tweet-bad-on-street governance model...

... esp considering we haven't even vaccinated all frontline workers & elderly persons in India itself.

But as a historian, I was taken back to the famous story of Dwarkanath Kotnis.

Those who kno about Kotnis dont often kno that he went to China as part of a mission of Indian doctors specially sent ther by d Indian National Congress (INC). Historian Maria Framke has told here the story of this mission, and more generally of WW2-era "Indian humanitarianism:

Even before this 1938 mission, Indian people (reminder: we were under British rule) were active in humanitarian missions. "In the course of the 1930s the INC and civil society actors provided.. financial and material humanitarian assistance to Abyssinia and the Spanish Republic."

As for the China mission, Tagore's visit to China & d arrival of scholar Tan Yunshan at Santiniketan in d 1920s wer crucial, as these catalyzed a bonhomie between the two nations. When the China-Japan war broke out in 1937, Indian sympathies overwhelmingly sided with the Chinese.

India's support was also part of a "global network of protests against Japanese aggression... Nehru received a telegram from John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, & Romain Rolland exhorting the Indian people to join their anti-Japanese protest."

Direct appeals for help were made by the Chinese to the INC. "Aware that the collection of substantial funds was vital, Congress president Subhas Chandra Bose called upon his fellow countrymen to donate liberally."

For the medical mission they invited applications for four "qualified doctors, preferably experienced surgeons, willing to serve for at least one year." 700 applied. The chosen ones were: M. R. Cholkar, Dwarkanath Kotnis, B. K. Basu, D. Mukherjee, & Madan Atal (mission leader).

This rousing scene from d 1946 movie Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani, with what appears to be a fictional Nehru's voice in the background, dramatizes the decision of Kotnis to join the mission (the scene obv takes much poetic licence)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=63&v=739Fq4og4zo&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=ShemarooVintage

Once in China, the doctors met "Mao Zedong, Song Qingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, Lin Sen, and Dai Jitao, and British authors Charlotte Haldane and Freda Utley as well as American journalists Agnes Smedley & Edgar Snow."

Their final destination was Yan’an. There they ran a new hospital & worked with the Chinese National Red Cross. Besides, Basu wassurgeon-in-charge of the ENT & Eye department in the International Peace Hospital in Yan’an, Kotnis taught at the Bethune International Peace Hospital.

As many know, Kotnis married a Chinese national, but soon died in 1942 (Framke says of epilepsy). His wife Guo Qinglan died in 2012. Interestingly, the Chinese state continues to remember and honor Kotnis to this day. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/china-commemorates-110th-birth-anniversary-of-dr-dwarkanath-kotnis/articleshow/78607503.cms

Post-independence, India "provided diplomatic & material support for the Indonesian fight for independence by despatching a medical mission with large supplies of medicine to Indonesia. During the Korean War India sent a medical unit to South Korea to help the victims of war."

What began as a story of Asian friendship for Nehru & India did not end well, wit Chinese leaders' ambitions gettin in the way. Of course therz much disinformation on d India-China war of 1962. Tagging historian Srinath Raghavan's book for folks interested in factual histories.