Like most of Asia, in the days before Mossadegh, India lit its lamps and powered its gasoline engines largely with Abadan petroleum. Then Abadan shut down. India, pinched for oil (it had to cut civil air traffic 20%), awakened to the fact that it was refining only about 6% of the oil it consumed.
The new state decided that it must refine its own, and that it needed help. But here it ran smash into its own hostility to foreign businessmen. To get oil, India would have to break with old prejudices.
Last week...
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