[Modi & Trump]

Canadian PM Mark Carney caused a sonic boom at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week by deflating US President Donald J Trump without much ceremony. He called a spade a shovel, told Trump where to get off, and won rousing acclaim from everyone for showing the gall that leaders of other countries, who have been at the receiving end of Trump’s increasingly wayward, intentionally hurtful, policies, have gritted their teeth but shied away from doing. Carney also laid out a road map for those countries that fear they cannot do without the US on their side and without Trump’s benevolence. He advised Middle Powers to cast aside complacency, and come together to mind their trade and security and to thwart “American hegemony”.

It was an extraordinary address because it broke through the barrier of fear and reticence of confronting America. Particularly, for Canada because the US accounts for 77% of Canada’s goods exports, 46% of total foreign direct investment, and over 60% of Canada’s merchandise trade (per 2023-2024 figures). If despite such US stranglehold on his country’s economy, Carney stomped on Trump and dared him to do his worst, it shows that Ottawa has had it with Trump and his unending shenanigans — a sentiment evidenced in the speeches by European leaders who followed Carney, such as the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and President Emmanuel Macron in Paris who warned the US about the European Union retaliating with a trade “bazooka”, and by an European legislator who in parliament told Trump “to f***k off”!

Even as the Davos meet ended, a bunch of European NATO members, perceiving a serious military danger from Trump, airlifted troops to Nuuk to show solidarity with a Danish military contingent deployed for the defence of Greenland against America, indicating just how radically the security situation has changed, resulting in NATO, along with the liberal, rules-based, international order, coming apart. In Carney’s words — “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” — a phrase that sounded the gong on the prevailing disorder. (If you haven’t heard Carney’s Davos speech, do so — it is stunning in its eloquence and refreshing in its unvarnished view of the current international affairs. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izDAOvHz5Wc )

Further, as if to show that Canada and the world had economic alternatives, Carney sought rapprochement with China, slashing the 60%+ tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 6% as a curtain raiser to a possible trade agreement with Beijing. A discombobulated Trump, used to foreign leaders letting him walk all over them, and shaken by Carney’s unexpected and devastating onslaught, threatened, what else, 100% tariffs. Ho hum!

Less exposed than Canada but visciously targeted by Trump with 50% tariffs, India ended up doing a bit of what Carney recommended. Its exporters found alternative markets for their wares but this trend did not motivate Delhi to up the ante and, in callibrated fashion, pull away from America. Buckling under pressure, it chose instead to comply, acquiescing in Trump’s demand to stop the buys of Russian oil. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reports a 29% month-on-month drop in the Indian offtake of Russian energy.

Restraint is unlikely to earn India and Narendra Modi any respite, because Trump will only pile on more pressure because, alone among large countries, it succumbed. A bully will not relent unless the bullied stands up to him — the reason for Carney and even the British PM Keith Starmer growing a spine, and then he will slink away. As Trump has time and again done when confronting a Putin or a Kim Jong-un, and now Carney.

The former BJP Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta somewhat optimistically thinks the stereotype of the Hindu as “mild” and “patient” that Swami Vivekananda decried, has been replaced by Modi’s “assertive” Indian, and that India has acquired a more aggressive persona. If so, this change is nowhere reflected in the country’s America policy. In fact, the Modi government’s non-reactive, submissive attitude will only impel Trump to heap more scorn and humiliation on Modi and the country.

So far the Narendra Modi dispensation has studiously avoided saying or doing anything (Re: Trump projects — 50% tariffs, Venezuela, “Board of Peace” for Gaza, FTA under negotiation) that it fears would aggravate already bad relations. The external affairs minister (EAM) S Jaishankar, on his part, limited himself in this period to his politically safe and favourite schtick of dumping on terrorism and Pakistan, and getting passing foreign dignitaries to nod sympathetically. Thus, we had the Polish and the Spanish foreign ministers clucking censoriously even as Islamabad, on US instructions, funnels Pakistan Ordnance Board-produced artillery shells and small arms ammunition to Ukraine through the Warsaw-Kyiv rail link. And, just as futilely, the EAM has been plugging multilateralism from every available forum when it is actually on its last legs, just as the United Nations is. It proves that, as always, Delhi is the last in the station to know that the train it had long hoped to ride first class in, has gone off the rails. More generally, the Indian government seems to not even understand anymore what matters in international affairs, or even what the currency of exchange is. Psst.. it is hard power! Like in the good old days of gunboat diplomacy!

The rest of the world seems to have grasped this reality. And is responding as Carney, Merz and other European leaders did at Davos, including the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, all of whom said the old order is gone, never to return, and called for “independence” from the US, for military self-sufficiency, and for seeing the old style alliance as a vehicle for national subordination. They also agree on genuine free trade agreements as the solution, with von der Leyen referring to the FTA with India to be announced this Republic Day week as potentially the most economically potent agreement EU is signing.

Then there is Modi’s India, that still believes America is the answer to its prayer, when Trump has made it abundantly clear that he is contemptuous of Modi and his pretensions, and that he’d take every opportunity to kick India in the teeth. But that’s the sum and substance of Modi-Jaishankar’s “three monkeys” US policy — see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, verily fitting into Carney’s box of states that “go along to get along”. Delhi seems entirely oblivious to, or completely in sync with, the truism the Canadian leader also mouthed that “Sovereignty is the ability to withstand pressure”. What we are, therefore, witnessing is the Indian government’s determination to make good on relations with the US even if as an appendage, notwithstanding the traditional ally-appendages in Europe seeking an escape from thralldom.

It suggests that there is no one in the Indian government that can read Washington, or indeed Beijing. Because, if there were, in fact, somebody of note, Delhi would not step repeatedly into traps set by the US (civilian nuclear deal, Op Sindoor, technology transfer, free trade agreement) and China (LAC, trade imbalance), and look foolish. Sure, the commentariat has finally woken up to the perils of proximity to the US, but warnings had been repeatedly and consistently issued by this analyst in his books, blog, and other writings over the past 30 years about an absolutely unreliable America that Delhi needs to deal carefully with.

A deeper understanding of a foreign country comes from spending a lot of time there. But where America is concerned, there is no one in the government — not a single person that I know of, who has resided there for any length of time (Jaishankar pulled a short 3-year stint as political counsellor in the Washington embassy in the mid-1980s), and can leaven policy discussions within establishment circles with any special insights. Our diplomats and civil servants are like Indian academics and media persons — acquainted with America in arranged settings (official interaction, university and think tank seminars and conferences, or US State Department-hosted tours, and the like) that leave them dazzled, and yearning to somehow relocate there or, better still, to get their progeny settled with green cards!

From the enduring Indian national interest perspective, what Trump has done is to be welcomed! He has clarified the options for the Modi regime by closing the H1B visa gate for techies and prospective Silicon Valley millionaires, and the daily news of Indians getting shot, mugged, or harrassed, has put the NRI community on notice. The overconfidence of the Indian settler in the pre-MAGA days led to excesses. Such as the 90-foot-tall statue of Lord Hanuman, dubbed by some over-clever NRIs who installed it, as the “Statue of Union” in Sugar Land, Texas. Besides being considered an eyesore by the enraged local Texans, it is a goad for the Christian Nationalists of the American south and southwest that make up the MAGA flock. So far they have restricted themselves to mocking the Monkey God, reviling Hindus as savages, Hinduism as satanic, and Hindu religious symbols as an affront to Christianity. Soon they may take a hammer to the statue, and run the Indians out of the town.

The US east and west coasts are considered relatively liberal. But so was Texas until recently, whence the large NRI community in Houston, say. The upside is that the pesky Khalistani element among the Sikh Americans has gone quiet, and will stay quiet. After all, they can’t tell when Trump and MAGA will turn fully on them, and they may need Delhi’s support. As it is, the turbaned Sikhs are in the same category as the Hanuman statue — a magnet for the crazies to beat up on “bin Laden” look-alikes. Just as the red tika on sari-ed women’s foreheads, in the 1990s, drew the skinheads into physically attacking them in New Jersey.

What Messrs Modi, Jaishankar, et al, have not learned is that Trumpian transactionalism is not some stumble that will pass in 2029, but here to stay as the new pillar of American foreign policy. Delhi can still strike a deal here, a bargain there, if the price is right, and here Modi, to earn goodwill, has gone overboard with a spate of government-to-government deals for assorted military hardware and weapons platforms. But, rather, by its very nature, transactionalism will lead only to more transactions, not to what Modi had hoped — some grand scheme of comprehensive cooperation organically linking India to the US through intermeshed economies and the large NRI community in America, to stabilise South Asia, Asia and the Indo-Pacific!

With the FTA with the EU round the corner — what with von der Leyen and her colleagues as special guests at tomorrow’s Republic Day parade, I fear a disappointed Modi government will now think the EU will be what the US failed to be, and fall with relief into the European lap, to be as thoroughly exploited this time by the Europeans!