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| Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump at the White House in February. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) |
| When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in May, the Indian premier was in an exuberant mood at the prospect of a second Trump term. Trump was a man with whom Modi had formed a personal bond — or even better, a friendship. Did the two not share fond memories, Modi reminisced, of appearing together at the “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas in 2019, and of hosting another joint mega-event in Modi’s home state of Gujarat in 2020? In the coming years, would the two not advance the U.S.-India relationship with “the same warmth, the same trust, the same excitement”? Apparently not. On July 30, months into deadlocked negotiations for a U.S.-India trade deal, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would be slapping 25 percent tariffs on Indian imports. Not eight hours later, Trump added insult to injury by announcing a trade deal with Pakistan, India’s perennial rival, at a lower tariff rate of 19 percent. The tension escalated from there. Trump called India’s economy “dead” and warned last Monday that tariffs on India would be “substantially” raised. On Wednesday, the number was revealed: 50 percent, which would be one of the highest tariff rates imposed by the United States anywhere in the world. What accounts for this abrupt reversal? If Trump’s Truth Social posts are to be taken at face value, the tariffs punish India’s relationship with Russia: India imports significant amounts of Russian oil, and Indian manufacturers have shipped parts and weapons to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine. But Trump is apparently content to allow some nations to profit off Russia, as Indian officials have repeatedly argued. China, which buys more crude oil and oil products from Russia than India, was given an extension to negotiate a trade deal a day before Trump imposed the first round of punitive tariffs on India. Russia itself, for that matter, enjoys a luxurious 10 percent tariff rate. The India-Russia relationship has also historically played to U.S. interests, as my colleagues reported last week. In the early days of the war, European nations placed sanctions on the purchase of Russian oil. The only problem? Europe was still heavily dependent on Russian energy. With the tacit encouragement of the U.S., India bought Russian crude oil at cheap prices, processed it and exported it to European nations, thus helping Europe avoid directly violating its own financial sanctions against Russia. Having India buy Russian oil “satisfied multiple players in this game,” Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. But “all that now is ancient history, because we’ve changed our policy. What India did without penalty before has now become a source of consternation to this administration.” Beyond India-Russia relations, personal rancor is a possible factor in play. Trump took offense with New Delhi’s behavior in the aftermath of the India-Pakistan conflict in May, when India refused to acknowledge Trump’s role in mediating a ceasefire. Trump, gunning for the Nobel Peace Prize, has cited ending the India-Pakistan conflict as one of the reasons he deserves the award. “The way that entire India-Pakistan crisis ended left him with a rather sour taste, because he thought the Indians should have been grateful for his intervention,” Tellis said. “Instead, they ended up simply carping about his role. I think from that time onward, he just started to look at India in a somewhat different way.” Trump’s annoyance appears to have opened the door to anti-India sentiment from multiple quarters in the White House. For economic right-wingers such as Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, long-held gripes about India’s protectionist economy and high trade barriers are finally seeing the light of day. And for the anti-immigration right — people including Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff — India is in the crosshairs as the largest beneficiary of the H-1B visa program, which offers skilled foreign workers a pathway to U.S. permanent residency. Domestically, the Modi government is caught between a rock and a hard place. New Delhi’s best hope out of punishing U.S. tariffs is to negotiate a trade deal, but to do so, Modi faces a difficult political balancing act back home. One of Washington’s main demands is to open the Indian market to U.S. agricultural crops and dairy products. But unfortunately for Modi, the country’s agriculture and dairy industries are the third rail of Indian politics: Any attempt to loosen the trade barriers protecting these two sectors is a surefire way to lose the next election. Farmers, who account for around 45 percent of India’s labor force, are a critical constituency for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As Maya Prakash noted in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, one of the few stinging defeats in Modi’s 11-year premiership came in 2020, when his government passed legislation that would have potentially reduced farmers’ earnings, leading agricultural workers to mount widespread protests across northern India. After 16 months of highway shutdowns and routs for the BJP in state-level elections, the government was forced to repeal the bills. Importing U.S. dairy — which may come from cows fed with animal-derived products such as tallow — is also a no-go for India, where an 80 percent Hindu population opposes animal-fed dairy on cultural grounds. Though the domestic Indian opposition is no fan of Trump — opposition leader Rahul Gandhi called the tariffs “economic blackmail” on Wednesday — they know to pounce if Modi budges on agriculture or dairy. The “government needs to stand up straight and demonstrate some spine against this coercion and bullying,” Manish Tewari, a member of the opposition Congress party, told Indian media Thursday. In the meantime, Modi will have to do his best to navigate tariff turbulence. During a rally on Aug. 2, Modi obliquely referred to the U.S. tariffs without mentioning Trump by name, exhorting his citizens to buy Indian-made goods “made with the sweat of the people of India” while unveiling a new slogan, “Vocal for Local.” But talk, especially defiant talk, is cheap in Indian politics. In 2020, after Chinese and Indian soldiers clashed in a deadly border dispute, Modi announced an initiative to boycott Chinese imports and build an “Atmanirbhar Bharat” — a self-reliant India. Even so, Indian imports from China surged from $65 billion in 2020 to $113 billion in 2024. In a similar vein, Modi may well have to eventually cave on the issue of Russian oil — less because Trump is profoundly concerned with India funding Russia and more to signal that New Delhi is willing to bend the knee. “My suspicion is that they will stop buying Russian oil progressively,” Tellis said. “But they will be very cagey about announcing that publicly, because if they do, then it will look like an unconditional surrender to Trump.” India will survive the tariffs, but they could slow the country’s GDP growth by a full percentage point, according to Indian media reports. Close U.S.-India relations, painstakingly forged over many decades, may not fare as well. When India gained independence in 1947, its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, championed the “nonaligned” movement, rejecting entry into the orbit of either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Nearly eight decades later, India remains true to its nonalignment ethos in certain respects: It is both part of the Quad, an informal grouping with the U.S., Japan and Australia to counter China in the Indo-Pacific, and BRICS, a geopolitical bloc that includes China. Since 2008, however, when the U.S. and India signed a landmark deal to cooperate on civil nuclear energy, successive administrations in the White House have pried India away from its traditional posture — which always seemed closer to Moscow than Washington — and toward the U.S. in the hopes that India could act as a bulwark against China. So important was cooperating against China that the U.S. was willing to separate economic and strategic relations with India: Policymakers in Washington prevented unresolved disagreements over protectionism or intellectual property from getting in the way of advancing defense sales and intelligence sharing. Meanwhile, the Modi government reciprocated by embracing the American right, going so far as to have Ram Madhav, the national general secretary of the BJP, speak at a forum affiliated with the U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Conference. But Trump has so far evinced little concern for great-power strategic competition with China, at least where India is concerned. That has freed the U.S. president to demand that India choose between its defense interests and its protectionist idiosyncrasies. Trump’s India strategy “is really incomprehensible,” Tellis said. “This may turn out to be another one of those very costly whims of the president that the country will ultimately end up paying for.” The possibility of returning to a prelapsarian Trump-Modi bromance is now fast fading. India has instead dug its heels into its relationships with Russia and China: Modi sent his national security adviser to Moscow on Wednesday and said he would visit China in early September for the first time in seven years. “I may have to pay a very heavy price personally” for refusing to cave to Trump, Modi said at a public event Friday. “But I am prepared for it.” | ||||||||||||||||||