China announced that it is lifting restrictions on the export of fertilisers, rare earth magnets, and tunnel boring machines to India. This comes after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar strongly raised India’s concerns with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in back-to-back meetings last month. Fertiliser supplies had been hit hard, impacting farmers during the Rabi season. Tunnel boring machines, critical for Prime Minister Modi’s infrastructure push, had been held up. And the automobile and electronics industries were raising alarm bells over shortages of rare earth minerals, which are the backbone of future technologies and defence equipment.

Now that shipments are reportedly on the move again, some in the Delhi commentariat are busy projecting this as a “reset" in India-China ties.

This is where the dangerous naïvety of the Lutyens media and the Opposition ecosystem comes to the fore. For decades, they have romanticised Beijing, from Nehru’s infamous “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai" disaster to the Congress party’s questionable MoUs with the Chinese Communist Party. Their intellectual heirs in the media will now celebrate this as a diplomatic triumph of “Asian solidarity." But the Modi government and the people of Bharat know better.

China does not give anything without extracting leverage. What is being showcased as goodwill could be nothing more than tactical manipulation.

Beijing’s timing tells the........

© News18