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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Ora Ogunbiyi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The Scottish National Party has had a stranglehold on the country's politics for years, and not so long ago seemed close to getting its 1 great wish, independence. Now it's lost its long-time leader, its totem. It looks like a party on the ropes.

And... Posting a dead body across the Atlantic is a tricky process. It involves a whole lot of ice, for 1 thing. Our correspondent tells us why the international trade in body parts really is quite literally vital. I hope you're not squeamish.

But first... India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, arrives in America today. He's kicking off his four-day visit by leading a yoga session at the UN headquarters in New York. Tomorrow he'll address Congress, a rare privilege for a foreign leader, before heading to a state dinner with President Joe Biden. America is trying to deepen its partnership with India.

The Asian giant has become increasingly important for Washington's interests in the region, including deterring Chinese aggression. India also has much to gain from the relationship, but a history of non-alliance means that its allegiances are much more diverse, and that it also has to protect long-standing relationships with Russia and China. And it's up to Mr Modi to keep up this very delicate balancing act.

Modi has been India's Prime Minister for just about exactly 9 years. He's gone to Washington DC almost every year of those 9 years.

James Astor is The Economist's Asia editor.

Almost every time that he's gone to Washington DC, there's been a sense that his visit marks a closer, deeper America-India relationship. And this occasion, This visit is no exception to that.

So what's India hoping to get out of this visit?

Broadly, India wants corroboration of the deeper, closer India-US relationship that Modi and indeed President Biden are both very committed to. But more specifically, from a sort of policy and investment perspective, India should get an agreement with America to deepen defense industrial cooperation. I went to Delhi just a week before Modi set off to Washington, D.C., to get a deeper sense of the Indian thinking, Indian preparations around this trip and more broadly India's rapidly emerging and increasingly important idea of its role in the world. Let's

keep an hour as the outer limit.

Okay, for sure. Thank you very much. I interviewed the very powerful, influential Indian foreign minister, Subramaniam Jai Shankar.

From, I'm giving you now an Indian perspective.

Who gave us a rare hour-plus long interview to walk us through that emerging Indian foreign policy.

We would like to have multiple choices. I look at what are the costs and benefits of various relationship. And the real challenge of diplomacy is how do you reconcile that with sometimes what are contradictory pulls and pressures.

India is not gonna join any US campaign against China. India does not see itself as a potential ally of America or any other power. India sees itself as an emerging great power in an increasingly multipolar world. That dance with multiple partners notwithstanding, India is clearly moving closer and closer to America and its Western allies.

I think what you will see next week is a public and visible expression of the state of the relationship between India and the United States, which is very good, which is getting better by the day, which is getting more consequential by the day.

But at the same time, it doesn't want to be tied down by the West, let alone answerable to the West.

But how does America view its relationship with India?

I think it slightly depends on which America we're speaking of. On Capitol Hill in particular there are many who have sort of caught the India bug, who don't have a great knowledge of India or its foreign policy history but see it as a big emerging economy, a democracy, surely it shares America's liberal values and to boot it's worried about China, like America's worried about China, therefore it's a natural American ally. There is on the other hand and more importantly in this administration, Joe Biden's administration, a lot more India expertise and therefore an awareness that even though India is a democracy, even though it's a rising economic power, and even though it shares some of America's concerns about China, it's not going to be an American ally because India essentially doesn't do alliances. It's not going to be a very predictable, let alone biddable, American security partner. It's going to be something looser.

It's going to be more of a partnership of equals than that.

And you said India's keen to move closer and closer. What did Mr. Jaishankar have to say about what's behind this change in India's foreign policy?

In some ways, India's foreign policy hasn't changed all that much, which is to say, from its earliest period of post-1947 independence, it's been very, very wary of being tied down in an alliance. It's a sort of post-colonial fear of being beholden to a bigger, richer power. But the context in which India's executing that foreign policy is now transformed. It's radically different. Minister Jai Shankar certainly emphasizes that growing Indian economic weight in the world.

And Indeed, he predicts that demography alone will ensure that that economic growth continues.

We have 1 major card, which is the human resources. That today I can churn out people at a scale and rate which no other democratic society certainly can.

India's economic emergence and America and the West's growing fear of China means that India is just central to geopolitics in a way that it never was before. And that growing relevance gives it growing opportunities.

And you mentioned China. I mean, that's another international relationship that India has to manage carefully, right?

The India-China relationship is absolutely critical to India in the world generally. It's India's enormous population, growing economic weight, unique potential as far as America is concerned to play the role of counterweight to China that really unleashed this enormous appetite in America for a closer relationship with India. By the same token, it's India's growing fear of Chinese aggression that has unlocked an impressive Indian appetite for closer strategic ties to America, as well as economic ones. And I should underline that that Indian fear of Chinese aggression is based on real violence. In 2020, there were a series of vicious border clashes involving Chinese and Indian troops and the aftermath of those clashes in 2020, it's still haunting the India-Chinese relationship today.

We're seeing unprecedented military exercises between America and India. We're seeing this growing defence industrial collaboration between India and America. And that's absolutely about the 2 countries' mutual fear of China.

And James, there's another 1 of America's adversaries that India's got to be careful with. I mean, Modi hasn't even condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. What did Mr. Jaishankar have to say about their relationship with Russia?

India finds the Western condemnation of its refusal to kind of wade in as it sees it on the Ukraine-Russia war, it finds it perplexing.

For us, it's been a cardinal principle of our foreign policy, which still remains valid, that maintaining a strong relationship and a good relationship with Russia is essential.

As far as India is concerned, it's had a deep security and strategic relationship with Russia going back more than half a century. It takes a very pragmatic view of that relationship. It thinks that it's far more in its national interest than, as it sees it, grandstanding on Russia and Ukraine would be. And indeed, India's taking a lot of advantage from the Russia-Ukraine war because it's greedily buying up cut-price Russian resources that are no longer going to the West.

So I expect Russia to turn more towards Asia.

Far from finding anything to apologize for in its continuing close relationship with Russia, India appears to be taking unashamed advantage of that relationship right now. You seem to be suggesting that, and I don't mean this pejoratively, that the Ukraine war is a strategic opportunity for India to get closer to Russia or to get more out of its relationship with Russia.

No, it's not so much an opportunity or a challenge. I'm describing to you what I think is the likely geopolitical trend. I'm trying to anticipate Russia's behaviour and calculations from the present predicament in which they are.

For India it would seem there is no need for alliances, there are no moral imperatives in foreign policy, only challenges and opportunities.

What does this mean for India going forward?

I think 3 key things, Arya. 1, India emphatically does not see itself in the West's or in anyone's camp. It sees itself as a great power in a multipolar environment where it's negotiating different relationships with other great powers. That's 1 thing. Secondly, it's justified in that view.

It's not in India's interest to be tied down in a Western anti-China alliance, for example. It's clearly not in India's interest to be outside America's orbit.

You have today actually an India which is looking at multiple opportunities across multiple geographies, often polities which have contradictory interests or outlook at this time, trying to in that sense advance on all fronts.

And thirdly, even if that's the emerging geopolitical reality, and I think it is, even if India is justified in taking that view of its role in the world, it's going to be a more

unstable future. It's going

to be a more unstable future. It's going to be a more unpredictable geopolitical realm in which you have these roving great powers negotiating relationships with each other in this contradictory and fluid manner.

James, thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you very much.

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Things are going to be a bit awkward later this week when the members of the Scottish National Party meet. They've lost a charismatic leader and their core reason for being looks to be in doubt. It would be an understatement to say that Scotland has historically had a fraught relationship with its neighbors in England. You've heard of Braveheart, right?

They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom! No!

In modern times, the independence movement has taken shape in the Scottish National Party, whose platform is completely centred on the idea of secession. Back in 2014, it got its wish, a referendum on independence.

The polls have opened in an historic referendum on Scottish independence, which could see Scotland break away from the 300-year-old union if

a majority of people vote Yes. It didn't pass, but the effort empowered the nationalists, cementing the SNP at the centre of Scotland's politics and the largest Scottish party in Britain's parliament in London. That's thanks mostly to the party's single-minded leader, Nicola Sturgeon.

Last night, the SNP won an incredible 80% of seats in Scotland, an overwhelming endorsement of our campaign, message and vision.

This year, though, things got messy for the SNP. In March, Ms. Sturgeon stepped down as head of the party, citing the pressures of the job. And in April, a couple of arrests made things messier still. So at this week's meeting, a convention on independence, Party bosses have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Recent months have been full of turmoil in Scottish politics.

Matthew Hullhouse is our British politics correspondent.

It's a combination of exhaustion from governing for 16 years, plus a scandal over party donations, really is signalling the end of the SNP's electoral dominance and with it the prospect, at least in the medium term, of the second referendum on Scottish independence that that party exists to bring about.

And when you say part of the problem here is scandal. What do you mean?

Nicola Sturgeon resigned as a leader of the Scottish National Party and stepped down as Scotland's first minister in February. The reason she gave at the time was that she was tired, she wanted her life back. It was a very Jacinda Ardern-like statement.

And the nature and form of modern political discourse means that there is a much greater intensity, dare I say it, brutality, to life as a politician than in years gone by. It takes its toll on you and on those around you.

But her departure took on a slightly different light when 2 months later police raided the home that she shares with Peter Murrell, who is her husband, but also for a long time the SNP's chief executive.

In the last hour or so we can see the garage there of Peter Murrell, the garage of Nicola Sturgeon. It is now closed, but we can tell you that there has been a hive of police activity within that garage.

The police were investigating allegations around the misuse of funds which were raised by the party for use ostensibly for a second referendum on Scottish independence. This culminated in Ms Sturgeon being arrested on June the 11th and taken in for questioning. She was later released. The investigation continues. She, it is worth stressing, insists that she is innocent of any wrongdoing.

So how did this investigation even get started?

So the investigation into the SNP's finances began in

2021.

It was triggered by complaints from donors who claimed that the money that had been raised to fight a future independence referendum was effectively not where they thought it should be. When police searched Ms Sturgeon's home, it is reported by the press in Scotland that they were looking for items including a woman's razor, jewellery and a wheelbarrow. Most embarrassingly for the party, a large motorhome was seized from 1 of the relatives' homes of Mr Morrill and taken to a police lockup. Again, we should stress that she denies any wrongdoing, but all this has proven horrifically embarrassing for the couple themselves and also for the party, which between them, they really dominated. And it all had the effect of making this rather romantic movement, which in its rhetoric draws on a sort of a sweeping narrative of history and of remaking geography.

It all made it look rather small and somewhat humiliated to have the blue police tent outside their home.

And so is it her departure, her absence, that's to blame for the shift that now seems to be happening in the party more generally?

Well, it's fair to say that the SNP's polling was already beginning to slide in the months before she quit. But since she's gone and since these allegations surfaced, it really has begun to crater. Now, part of that is probably down to her successor Hamza Yousaf who SNP members narrowly elected to take the helm of the party on March 27th and consequently became Scotland's first minister.

It is a really proud day for me and my family. I hope it's also a proud day for Scotland as it speaks to our values as a country as I stand here as the first ever Muslim to lead a Western democratic nation.

The problem is that he is neither particularly charismatic nor particularly nimble on his feet and his personal ratings are pretty weak, including amongst nationalist voters. And so he has not been able to summon the sustained momentum and enthusiasm that Ms. Sturgeon did that allowed her to continue pushing this cause of independence, often in defiance of insurmountable obstacles.

So the party is losing the faith of the very people that are at its core essentially.

So for a long time the Scottish National Party has exerted a near monopoly over nationalist support in Scotland, that is people who support Scottish independence. That is 1 of the reasons why they've been able to sustain their electoral dominance. Since January, however, that has started to crater. While support for Scottish independence is remaining relatively firm, the proportion of nationalists who say they will support the SNP as a party has fallen from

79%

to 65%. All this means that the dominance that the SNP has enjoyed in elections may be undone.

What about that core question of Scottish independence? Is that notion of a referendum even more distant now than it was before?

James Comey, Journalist, The Guardian

Realistically, in light of current events, you have to say on the conservative side that the prospect of a referendum is off for the rest of this decade at least. That is not just because of recent turmoil however, already there were 2 big obstacles that stood in the way of another independence referendum. 1 was constitutional, in November 2022 the British Supreme Court clarified that the Scottish Parliament alone cannot organise an independence referendum without the permission of the Westminster Parliament. The second obstacle was electoral, and that was this, that support for independence in Polls in Scotland never achieved the sort of sustained and clear majority in favor which would be necessary to force the British government to accede on another referendum, to give way and surrender its veto. The country remained split pretty much 50-50, never overcoming that.

So when you add to those 2 obstacles the fact now that the SNP's vote is declining it makes the prospect in the next few years look very small indeed.

So with all of this stacked up against the party, where does the SNP go from here?

So the party will meet for a special convention in Dundee on Friday to attempt to settle on a formula which will unite the party on how they secure the independence referendum which is the most animating cause. Their gambit at the moment is they say that there will be a hung parliament in the next UK general election and if that is the case they will try and extract the constitutional right for Scotland to hold a unilateral referendum in exchange for propping up a Labour government. Now that's a pretty long shot because A, the election may not come that way even if it does, it is not in the Labour Party's interest, having just formed a government for the first time in a long time, to start negotiating over the break-up of the UK, and the SNP's position for bargaining will be relatively limited if it goes backwards in terms of seats. At the same time, it is evident that Mr Yusuf is going to find it difficult to control his party. There are already people muttering in what once was an ultra-disciplined party about how long he can remain in his job if the polling doesn't improve.

And nobody knows exactly where this police investigation is going to run, how long for, what it may ultimately lead to. And so it is clear actually that this remarkable shift that we are seeing in Scottish politics has some distance yet to run.

Matthew, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

A human head will set you back around 636 quid. An arm is a little less, that will cost you

614.

But a hand you get for a knockdown 300 quid.

Catherine Nixie writes about Britain for The Economist.

As always, these prices aren't the whole thing, so postage and packaging add to the cost for shipping fresh frozen corpses from America. And not without reason, because it can be tricky. A leg needs a lot of ice to keep it frozen. These things can defrost at awkward moments, they can really puzzle customs officials if they open the wrong box. But overall, I mean, human body parts are surprisingly cheap.

Buying an almond and egg doesn't cost an almond and egg.

Sorry, Catherine, hold on a minute. Why have you been shopping for body parts and do I need to get the police in?

No, not for me. There's a lively international trade in dead human body parts for medical dissection and that allows medical professionals to practice on real dead humans before they get their hands on real live ones. Britain, like most countries, has always been bad about talking about how surgeons are trained. Until the 16th century, it was just flat out forbidden in Britain. It was a combination of sanctity and squeamishness meant nobody would allow it.

We had early attempts at entrepreneurship and opening up the market. There were 2 Edinburgh-based entrepreneurs who are now very famous called Burke and Hare, and they tried to invigorate the market by killing people on demand. And actually Burke and Hare really did sully the reputation of anatomists for quite a long time.

But surely lots has changed since then. I mean, with all this talk of AI and its many, many possibilities, couldn't much of this be done virtually?

Yes, and it is. And since the pandemic, it's increasingly been done virtually. But there are still loads of things that flesh and blood can do that AI can't do, such as, as It was explained to me, making medics faint. There's usually 1, apparently. Looking at a model, all doctors say this, it's not quite the same as having the real thing in front of you.

The variation you see on the surface of humans is absolutely nothing compared to what lies beneath. And actually, if you're listening, you can try this. If you take your thumb and your little finger and you pinch them together as hard as you can with your arm flat and then you move your hand upwards towards you, you will see 1 tendon going down your arm but some people will see 2. And there's that kind of variation all throughout your body. Textbooks will tell you that there are 3 branches coming off the aorta as it leaves the heart.

It's really common for people to have 2 branches or 4 branches. And so if you're a surgeon, you need to be viscerally aware of these sort of visceral changes.

OK, so it makes sense then that there's still demand for these bodies, but how does the industry match the supply? Are people super keen to have their remains fainted over and butchered by medical students?

Yeah, well, surprisingly, quite a lot of people are quite keen. We get around 1, 300, they call them donors. Anatomists are very careful to avoid the kind of words that probably I've been using in this. But there are loads of people who are really keen.

1, 300

bodies are accepted every year in Britain, but not all the bodies that are donated can be accepted, so more than that are given. But they are rejected for various reasons, so if you're too tall, you're no good because you come off the end of a dissecting table. If you're too fat, you're no good because people can't lift you. So this is why the trade exists. So we import them.

We have not enough. Some countries have a surplus and that's why we import ours from America.

And why does America have a surplus and we don't?

The reason some countries have a surplus and other countries don't have enough is it all depends on the kind of consent you need for your body to be used. So some countries have what you call first-person consent and that's what we've got and it's where you and only you once you're past the age of 18 can leave your body to medical science. Other countries have what's sort of generously called second-person consent, which is where after your irritating aunt dies, you can donate her body on her behalf to a medical charity. You don't have to pay for her funeral and the cost of dying, like the cost of living has risen, so it's very expensive. So it can be tempting and for people who are short of money or aren't particularly interested in the person whose body they now find themselves in the care of as responsible for, it can be a helpful thing.

In Britain it's changing because we've got this new centre called the National Repository Centre in Nottingham and Mark Curward, who's their senior anatomy technologist, showed me round.

We have a walk-in freezer, and to the side of that is a cabinet freezer, and then we have cabinet freezers to the right and to the left in the bottom corner. There's some racking which we use for when we are defrosting our donors from frozen state into to be ready to be used on courses. We'll put them on them racks ready to defrost.

That is a donor there?

That is a donor, yeah. It's a

nice place to go in a hot summer's day. Its temperature is a refreshingly cool 18 degrees C, which is apparently a good temperature to defrost donuts. You don't want them to go too fast or too slow. And the smell is fresh. It reminded me a bit like the kind of chemistry lab smell at school.

And in the freezers sat human legs, arms, heads and torsos.

So, Catherine, in light of all these changes, like new centres like the 1 in Nottingham, how might the body part industry be looking up in Britain?

This Nottingham Centre is a great thing. It's very similar to what America does in some ways, but doctors prefer it because, well, for 1 thing the prices are slightly lower, but the postage and packaging is far, far cheaper, partly because obviously we're closer and partly because this is a not-for-profit institution. Unlike the American companies, many of which do make profits, this 1 is making nothing. Ethically, it's a world away from the American system because you can be absolutely sure that if you buy body parts from the Nottingham Centre, then all of the donors were willing first person donors and that this is exactly what they wanted to happen to them after they died. It doesn't hurt as well that it's cheaper too.

The invisible hand plays its part in the sale of hands as well as everything else.

I'm so sorry to any squeamish listeners we have. Catherine, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you very much for having me.

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