Almost exactly six years ago, Donald Trump and Narendra Modi headlined an event in the Houston Texans’ football stadium called “Howdy, Modi.” Trump, then in his first term as President of the United States, and Modi, just beginning his second term as Prime Minister of India, held hands and waved to a crowd of around fifty thousand people. The two leaders had each risen to power by taking over their country’s dominant conservative parties—in Modi’s case, the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.)—and reorienting them around the demonization of ethnic or religious minorities and the promise of economic competence. During Trump’s Howdy, Modi speech, he said, “You have never had a better friend as President than President Donald Trump, that I can tell you.” There are more than five million people of Indian origin in the U.S., and in three Presidential elections Trump has steadily increased his vote share in that group, from under thirty per cent, in 2016, to nearly forty per cent last year, according to some estimates. (Modi is tremendously popular with the Indian diaspora.)
And yet, despite the fact that Trump is back in office, and Modi was elected to a third consecutive term, the relationship between the two countries is at its lowest point in many years. Earlier this summer, Trump put a twenty-five-per-cent tariff on India; then, in late August, he doubled it to fifty per cent, arguing that the rate was meant to punish India for buying Russian oil. Trump had already enraged some Indians by taking credit for brokering a ceasefire, in May, between India and Pakistan, after the countries had engaged in their worst military conflict in decades. (Pakistan’s government said that it would nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize; Modi, on a tense phone call with Trump, was reportedly unwilling to support such a proposal.) And now Modi, whose country was once seen by Washington as a bulwark against China in Asia, recently visited Tianjin as part of Xi Jinping’s push to create a new global diplomatic architecture without the United States.
To talk about the India-America relationship, I recently spoke by phone with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump has really turned against India, whether Modi’s political standing in India is finally showing some signs of strain, and why Indian Americans have been so quiet about Trump’s India policies.
Why do you think the America-India relationship has gone off the rails in the past few months? And why do you think the Indian government thinks it’s gone off the rails?
First, I think it has to do with this White House’s view of the global order and geopolitics, and second, it has to do with the personality of the President himself. Let me start with the first. One thing that is really striking is that there really doesn’t seem to be a coherent China policy in this Administration. You seem to have different factions that are jostling for primacy, and they have very different views about the China relationship. That’s important because part of how India has been sold within the American government is that it is this bulwark against China in the Asia-Pacific region. There’s been a bipartisan consensus on that. Once you take that out of the equation, India’s importance is no longer self-evident.
Then I think there’s the personality story. It is clear that this President is annoyed about what happened in the wake of the ceasefire between India and Pakistan. He did not believe that he got sufficient credit from the Indian side. Pakistan lavished him with praise, and nominated him for the Nobel Prize. India didn’t acknowledge the role of the United States at all, and so I think what we’re seeing is a mix of geopolitics and personal pique. [In April, after twenty-five tourists and one local Kashmiri were murdered in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, India and Pakistan exchanged missile strikes. Pakistan has historically supported armed separatist groups in the region, which has been the site of numerous human-rights abuses by the Indian government.]
From an Indian standpoint, I think they’ve come to share both of those views I laid out. A former Indian diplomat who was visiting Washington said to me that they used to be able to have meetings at the Pentagon and the State Department and talk about how critical India was, in terms of the larger geopolitical competition with China. And nowadays they hear people of this Administration say, “Don’t tell me what you’re doing for us on China. Tell me what you’re doing for us as America.”
Yes, there is rhetorical anti-China energy from the Trump people, but, when you boil it down to specifics, it doesn’t seem like the President really cares. With the TikTok ban, for example, he seems to want to get the company’s American interests sold off to his allies. There is no broader strategic policy.
Take American policy toward South Asia writ large. One of the reasons this Administration has given for why it is hitting the reset button on Pakistan is that Pakistan is home to critical minerals and natural resources, and they don’t want to see Chinese control of those resources, which we value dearly. At the same time, they seem to be entering into a period of estrangement with India, which has always been seen as a much more important country in terms of countering China. So it seems to me that there’s a fundamental contradiction there, in terms of where the policy is going.
