Washington: With his actions in the recent weeks, US President Donald Trump is now in the process of tanking the India-US relationship built over 25 years. His actions will affect the bilateral ties after more than 20 years of bipartisan effort to transform the relationship between India and the US, including during his own first term, US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace detailed in a report on Tuesday.
Trump has threatened to substantially raise tariffs on India and impose more for buying oil from Russia.
In a post shared on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump stated, “India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian Oil, they are then, for much of the Oil purchased, selling it on the Open Market for big profits.”
“They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA,” he stated.
In the Carnegie report, Evan Feigenbaum stated that Trump’s decision will be considered by India as “blunt coercion, gross interference in Indian foreign policy, impractical given India’s oil import needs, and a cynical effort to ‘blame India’ for the West’s (and Trump’s own) collective failure to get Moscow to stop its war on Ukraine”.
Trump had even threatened to impose additional tariffs on India for its participation in the BRICS grouping alongside Brazil, China, Russia, South Africa, and others. Analysts reckon Trump’s this decision also as gross interference and coercive.
Trump has criticised and threatened US firms that manufacture in India while encouraging them to invest in the US or face financial penalties. His statements have sharpened the contradiction between Trump’s “America First” and Modi’s “Make in India” visions, according to the report.
US President’s meeting with Pakistan’s Army Chief General Asim Munir at the White House within weeks of terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir and the decision to jointly explore Pakistan’s oil reserves has also set alarm bells ringing.
“Trump’s fulsome praise for Islamabad and dealmaking with Pakistan’s army and government now raise obvious concerns in New Delhi that this too has gone by the wayside. And these concerns have been amplified exponentially because Trump’s moves came within weeks of the April 22 terrorist attack that killed twenty-six Indian civilians in Pahalgam and led to a new outbreak of hostilities between the two countries,” the report detailed.
It stated that the US administration under Trump has continued to promote a new American technonationalism, wherein technology sharing with foreigners is seen with skepticism. Some around Trump want to keep American technology close to home while reducing exports and co-innovation with foreign partners, as per the report.
For the first time in 20 years, Trump’s actions, statements and coercive tone has made ties with the US a combustible domestic political issue in India, it added. The opposition, the media, and the people in India have urged government to avoid showing weakness in the face of Trump’s threats.
Issues that directly affect India are among the most partisan and explosive in the US, including H1B visas for tech workers, offshoring and overseas manufacturing by US companies, immigration and deportation and technology sharing and co-innovation with foreigners, the report said. This seems to be a bad sign for the next 20 years of US-India ties as overcoming domestic politics and partisanship has been perhaps the achievement since the first decade of the 2000s.
(IANS)
