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The White House later released images of Trump flashing the ‘thumbs up’ sign inside a garishly gilded Oval Office, flanked by a constipated Sharif and a puffed up Munir, who appeared to be wearing heels to match up to the taller US president. Appearance matters with Trump, and Pakistan has certainly caught up with him.
Then there were Trump and Melania’s beaming images with Muhammad Yunus and his US-based daughter. Yunus, who runs an unelected, Islamist regime in Bangladesh, was in New York to attend the UNGA session. He kept blaming India wherever he got the chance to speak.
As did Sharif, who spent the better part of his UNGA address venting frustrations at India. Not far behind was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Türkiye, who fashions himself as a neo-Ottoman ruler. Erdogan, who had sent a consignment of drones to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, dutifully raked up ‘Kashmir’ at UNGA and later posed for pictures with Trump after a one-on-one.
Incidentally, Trump, a vindictive man, has never hidden his dislike for Yunus ever since the Nobel Laureate donated money to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. And yet there he was, flashing his thumb and offering a beatific smile before the camera with Yunus in tow. One may be forgiven for surmising that Trump was making an explicit point to needle India.
This conclusion is harder to avoid if we consider Trump’s actions regarding India, America’s ‘strategic partner’ with whom the US shares ‘values’, ‘interests’ and ‘strategic convergence’ in the Indo-Pacific (or have we gone back to the Asia-Pacific?)
Since his return, Trump has held India firmly in his crosshairs. Be it trade, immigration, energy imports, diplomacy, strategic affairs or media narrative, even the most charitable interpretation of his slew of measures against India would seem adversarial. The pivot has been stark. India was among the rarest of nations that welcomed Trump’s return to power. In about seven months, he has turned India’s entire public opinion on him from favourability to hostility.
Trump has slapped 25% tariff against Indian goods in April, as part of his broader ‘reciprocity’ policy to correct perceived trade imbalances. He followed it up with another 25% additional tariffs, which he called ‘sanctions’, singling out India for ‘punishment’ for buying Russian energy.
Trump says India ‘fuels’ Russia’s war against Ukraine, and profiteers by selling refined Russian fuel elsewhere. His cronies have called it “Modi’s war”, and India, a “laundromat of Kremlin.”
The US sells weapons to NATO to be used in the war, and under Trump 2.0, US-Russia trade has grown by 20%. Washington buys fertilizers, uranium and palladium from Moscow. Europe remains the biggest buyer of Russian gas, while Turkey sources 66% of its crude, refined products and 41% of its natural gas from Russia. Hungary and Slovakia continue to rely largely on Russian gas and fuel to keep their economy running, whereas China remains the biggest buyer of Russian energy overall.
In Trump’s playbook, these actions do not amount to fuelling Putin’s war against Ukraine, but India’s purchase of price-capped Russian crude, does.
One can justifiably accuse Trump of hypocrisy, but the US president is an even better salesman than just a hypocrite. By forcing India, the second-largest buyer, to stop sourcing hydrocarbons from Russia and get it from US instead, Trump will ensure that energy prices go up globally and allow the US, a major oil producer, to sweep up the profits.
Trump is hitting India where it hurts the most. His trade war against India in form of 50% tariffs is specifically aimed at India’s labour-intensive exports, affecting billions in sectors like textiles, gems, jewelry, auto parts, and seafood. It has ravaged the industries and led to job losses. In September, Trump escalated further by announcing a 100% tariff on imported branded and patented pharmaceuticals. It is a potentially lethal blow to an industry in India almost entirely dependent on the American market.
The Trump administration has launched a ‘Section 232’ investigation into pharma imports to determine ‘national security’ threats, potentially paving the way for even broader tariff applications.
While the current tariffs explicitly target “branded or patented” pharmaceuticals, it has raised fears that generics could be next. The US is India’s largest pharma export destination, accounting for 31% of total exports valued at $8.7 billion in fiscal 2024.
Trump has not spared services, posing a direct threat to India’s $190 billion services export industry by drastically hiking up the cost of H-1B visas and disproportionately targeting Indian IT employees who form about 71% of the total recipients. He has also threatened legal immigration overall, slapped restrictions on student visas despite admissions to American universities, and his anti-immigration policies may threaten student visa holders who are trying to secure H1B visas for better-paying jobs in America.
The Economist quotes data from Goldman Sachs to report that “services exports grew from $53 billion to $338 billion between 2005 and 2023, almost twice the global rate. That growth was driven by a boom in India’s population of engineers, particularly in computer science. The IT firms relied on sending engineers to America under the H-1B programme to serve clients, a cornerstone of their business model.” This model now is in jeopardy.
Apart from the economic warfare, Trump is also hitting India strategically. The US has withdrawn the sanctions waiver on Iran’s Chabahar port, dealing a strategic blow to India. The move seals off the alternative route for India bypassing Pakistan for trade with Afghanistan and central Asia, hinders connectivity projects such as the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a multi-modal network designed to connect India with Russia and Europe via Iran, where Chabahar port was a crucial node, and denies India a strategic counterweight to Chinese influence in Pakistan’s Gwadar port.
Alongside, Trump has imposed sanctions on at least six Indian companies for its dealings with Iran, hosted Pakistan’s army chief Munir for a White House lunch, while announcing American assistance for exploring Pakistan's oil and gas reserves, not to speak of his offer of ‘mediating’ in Kashmir.
Trump has also put pressure on US firms such as Apple and Tesla against expanding manufacturing in India, threatened secondary sanctions over Russian arms deals, publicly labeled India a “dead economy” and called India and China “the primary funders” of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Taken together, Trump is raising the cost of India’s autonomous foreign policy and forcing New Delhi to pick a side. In the US president’s transactional worldview, for India to reap the benefits of aligning its economy with America’s in a web of complementarity, it must either accept America’s vassalage, pay appropriate suzerainty (of the kind paid by a Japan or South Korea) or be prepared to cough up a steep price for adopting an independent, multi-aligned foreign policy.
It remains to be seen whether these tariffs and sanctions are the last throw of the dice of a fading hegemon, but Trump and his giant tantrums are designed not to make the path for India smoother in its journey to become another pole in a multipolar world. America is now penalizing India for engagement with its adversaries and demanding greater strategic and economic alignment at the cost of severely bruising India’s economy.
The agriculture and dairy sectors, as I had pointed out in the past, are redlines for any Indian leader simply because these unorganized sectors cater to nearly 50% of Indian population and over “85% of agricultural households are subsistence farmers who are either landless or hold fragmented plots that amount to just 47.3% of crop area.” I had also pointed out in that piece that “the majority of livestock breeders in India keep only two to three animals. Evidently, this small-scale structure makes Indian farmers and breeders vulnerable” to competition from foreign producers and conglomerates that “operate at a much larger scale and benefit from automation, advanced technologies and significant state subsidies.”
Still, India was ready to walk the extra mile in its trade talks with the US and has been importing more American agricultural products. According to latest data from the USDA, American agricultural exports to India rose $1.936 billion in 2023 to $2.275 billion in 2024, marking a 17% increase ($339 million). India was the second-largest destination for American tree nuts, third-largest for ethanol, and seventh-largest for cotton. This growth aligns with broader trends, including the removal of India’s retaliatory tariffs on several US products in 2023–2024.
During the ongoing trade negotiations, despite India’s reservations against America’s genetically modified crops entering its food chain, New Delhi indicated that it is ready to purchase more American corn for ethanol production.
Trump should have taken this major win, but he wants even more. He wants India to bend the knee so that he may declare a ‘headline grabbing’ win before his MAGA cult, sweep the Oval Office floor with India’s redlines, self-respect and crack open the barriers of New Delhi’s agriculture and dairy sectors like a cheap can of tuna so that American conglomerates and agrobusinesses may reap extractive profits. Trump wants India to sign a neocolonial deal and allow Washington to dictate its trade and energy policies. In short, Trump wants India to be a client state.
The US president can afford to take such a gamble because he senses that India is in a double bind. New Delhi can neither afford to substitute America with China, its geopolitical and geoeconomic rival, nor can it accept the deal of servitude that Trump is extending. The Oval Office incumbent is a uniquely ignorant president with no grasp of history or geography but has an innate understanding of power politics. Trump has caught on to India’s existential dilemma and is trying to drive as hard a bargain as he possibly can.
Evidently, India won’t have the space, bandwidth or the good fortune to be aided with a tailwind as China enjoyed at America’s expense. In fact, taking a lesson from the way America dramatically developed China into a peer competitor, Trump wants to slow down India’s rise. He is rapidly closing the pathways as India demonstrates significant progress in moving up the value chain across critical and emerging technologies, and Trump’s approach indicates that he identifies India as a potential long-term competitor.
For India, the path to becoming a great power will be arduous climb, fraught with geopolitical risks and dramatically less space for hedging. One of the fundamental shifts Trump has initiated in American foreign policy posture is a change in the nature of rivalry with China from a strategic peer competitor to primarily an economic adversary.
This reduces India’s importance in America’s grand strategy and dislodges New Delhi from its earlier position as a ‘lynchpin’ in US Indo-Pacific strategy -- a democratic counterweight to China, to another middle power that has great power ambitions and runs an autonomous foreign policy that Trump is sceptical of, and finds exploitative.
India is now just another economic rival to America, and Trump won’t cede an inch. He has even less patience with India’s “non-allied” positions on contentious global issues such as Ukraine, Russian energy, or BRICS. In his approach, a ‘non-allied’ position is an unannounced adversarial stance, and India must either fully align with the American bloc, or risk American pressure tactics and punitive tariffs.
India must get ready for an intense economic competition with the US that will touch every dimension of its bilateral relationship, and this geopolitical churn will pose a stiff test for Indian leaders and policymakers.
The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
