How Trump's 'Game-changer' Drug is Boosting Nationalism in Brazil and India

Business Standard How Trump's 'game-changer' drug is boosting nationalism in Brazil and India

HCQ has now been removed by the US Federal Drug Administration's list of drugs approved for use against Covid-19, yet both India and Brazil continue to recommend its use as a treatment.

As Covid-19 spread around the world in early 2020, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), an anti-malaria drug touted as a miracle cure by the US president Donald Trump, triggered a global, polarised debate with significant geopolitical impacts.

The debate around HCQ in the United States was widely covered in international English-language media, but the controversy swirling around the same drug in Brazil and India — two countries where partisanship is equally as rife — has received less attention.

The countries deployed drastically different responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. India declared a national lockdown on March 25, while Brazil never instituted one. In both countries, however, the HCQ debate quickly became a useful rhetorical lever to push nationalist positions. Even as HCQ's efficacy remained unproven, its use was aggressively touted by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

HCQ has now been removed by the US Federal Drug Administration's list of drugs approved for use against Covid-19, yet both India and Brazil continue to recommend its use as a treatment.

Brazil and India have plenty in common. Both are middle-income economies and large democracies that have elected far-right nationalist leaders in the past decade. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have galvanized support around Hindu-nationalist sentiment in an attempt to raise India’s profile as an international powerhouse. Brazil elected Bolsonaro president in 2018 on a platform that blended tough-on-crime-and-corruption rhetoric with hardline cultural conservatism and ultra-liberal economic policy that promised sweeping labor and environmental deregulation.