Jaishankar urges UK Foreign Secretary to recognise India’s Covishield vaccination certificates

The issue is likely to come up again when PM Modi will have a bilateral meeting with his UK counterpart later this week.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday urged his counterpart in the British government, Elizabeth Truss, to expeditiously ensure recognition of the certificates issued by the Government of India to people fully inoculated with the Covishield anti-Covid-19 vaccines so that they could visit the United Kingdom without any hassle.

“Urged early resolution of quarantine issue in mutual interests,” Jaishankar tweeted after his meeting with Truss in New York, where both of them arrived to take part in the meetings related to the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The issue is likely to come up again when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have a bilateral meeting with his UK counterpart Boris Johnson in Washington D.C. later this week.

The new travel rules recently introduced by the British government do not recognise people travelling to the UK as vaccinated even if they received both the doses of the Covishield anti-Covid-19 vaccines under the inoculation programme in India. The new rules, which will come into force on October 4, implies that people, who received both doses of the vaccine developed by the AstraZeneca PLC and the Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII) in India, will be considered unvaccinated and hence will have to go through mandatory quarantine procedures on arrival in the UK.

What has irked New Delhi is that the UK government has decided to waive off the mandatory quarantine requirement for visitors, who are fully inoculated with the same vaccine developed by the AstraZeneca PLC and the Oxford University but manufactured in other countries.

Shashi Tharoor, the Congress MP from Kerala, protested the new travel rules introduced by the British Government and pulled out of some events he was to participate in in the UK, including a debate at the Cambridge University and the launch of his new book. His party colleague, Jairam Ramesh, too said that the new UK travel rules smacked of racism.

Also Read — 'Racist, offensive': Jairam Ramesh, Tharoor slam UK's Covid travel rules

Jaishankar conveyed to Truss that the British government’s new travel rules had triggered widespread criticism in India and it was not in sync with the spirit of the new Roadmap 2030 Modi and Johnson had agreed upon during the last summit held virtually on May 4 last.

This was the first meeting between the two after Truss took over as the new British Foreign Secretary, replacing Dominic Raab.

According to the British government’s new travel rules, only the people, who were inoculated with the vaccines, such as the double dose ones developed by AstraZeneca PLC, Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc or the single-dose one developed by the Johnson and Johnson’s “under an approved vaccination program in the UK, Europe, US or UK vaccine programme overseas”, will be considered fully vaccinated. Besides, beneficiaries of the inoculation programmes run by the public health authorities in Australia, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bahrain, Brunei, Canada, Dominica, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan will also be considered fully vaccinated.

The External Affairs Minister and the UK Foreign Secretary discussed the situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban last month returned to power through a military offensive across the country taking advantage of the withdrawal of troops by the United States and its NATO allies. They also discussed the developments in the Indo-Pacific region, where the UK recently joined Australia and the United States to forge a new security alliance AUKUS to counter hegemonic aspirations of China.