Shall be treated differently if vaccinated in India: Tharoor claims it racist.

Congress leaders Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh have taken a serious offence on behalf of all Indians at the new travel policy of the United Kingdom’s government, calling it offensive and racist.

The new applied rules, as explained by aviation analyst Alex Macheras, state that any person vaccinated in Africa, or South America, or countries including the UAE, India, Turkey, Jordan, Thailand, and Russia will still be considered unvaccinated and will have to go through the rules for being unvaccinated, which is 10 days of quarantine and tests.

Shashi Tharoor, who is a party MP from Thiruvanthapuram, tweeted the same and even said that he pulled out of the debate at Cambridge Union and also withdrew from the events for the launch of the UK edition of his book ‘The Battle of Belonging'. He said, "It is offensive to ask fully vaccinated Indians to quarantine. The Brits are reviewing" via his Twitter account.

In the same thread, Tharoor’s party colleague and Rajya Sabha member Jairam Ramesh said that UK’s travel policy was "absolutely bizarre". He even tweeted "Absolutely bizarre considering Covishield was originally developed in the UK and The Serum Institute, Pune has supplied to that country too! This smacks of racism."

Because of this I have pulled out of a debate at the @cambridgeunion &out of launch events for the UK edition of my book #TheBattleOfBelonging (published there as #TheStruggleForIndiasSoul). It is offensive to ask fully vaccinated Indians to quarantine. The Brits are reviewing! https://t.co/YEVy3Ez5dj — Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) September 20, 2021

The UK government made a three-tier system for the countries based on the level of Covid-19 cases. They were Amber for a mild number of cases, Red for a high number of cases, and Green for the countries with low or no cases. But now on September 17th, the UK government announced that from October 4 there will only be one red list.

India was a part of the UK’s amber list, which has now been scrapped, which should have reduced the burden of cost for travellers. However, the name of India is on the list of countries whose vaccines are not given consideration, which means that Indians who are vaccinated with the Covishield vaccine or the vaccine developed by the Serum Institute of India produced Oxford-Astra Zeneca vaccine, will have to go through a pre-departure PCR test and even further tests upon landing in the UK. Under the new rules, Indians will have to go through a 10-day quarantine in the UK and during the period they will be tested multiple times for Covid-19.