Ego massage & policy outcome: Modi and Trump

Posted on November 10, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Modi & Trump]

It is a fascinating subject — how leaders take the measure of each other, what happens subsequent to the first few meetings when the impression gets cemented, and how that impacts policy. In one of their first meetings, the wartime US President Franklin Roosevelt, seeking to convey an idea that had occurred to him, barged into the British Prime Minister’s living quarters to discover Winston Churchill standing stark naked in the room. Unruffled, the PM famously drawled “Britain has nothing to hide!” The two leaders got along rather well thereafter!

Nothing as revealing has happened between the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the US President Donald J Trump. But both being, personality-wise, in the same narcissist-autocrat mould — with everything that happens within their governments, and by their governments, being about themselves, may have had mirror impressions of the other.

Very likely, Modi must have been reassured that, unlike the quicker-on-the-ball and more cerebral Barack Obama, who had a Pakistani as his room mate at Columbia University and was familiar with the subcontinental ways — Trump could be pata-oed with a lot of people screaming it up in support, and the colour and the frenzy of a big Indian tamasha. Whence the two big “get to know” PR events in Houston (“Howdy, Modi!” — arranged by the Indian embassy and the Indian NRI community) and in Ahmedabad (“Namaskar, Trump!” — courtesy the Gujarat State and Central governments) would have convinced him of this, especially as Trump, in his first term, wanted to make sure that every noisy American at the Houston circus would convert into a vote for him in the 2020 Presidential elections. Modi, perhaps, calculated that having Trump attend the Ahmedabad do would signal his closeness to Trump, and his ability to get India’s interests realised in the US and the West, and also help him out in the 2024 general elections.

Modi’s belief that he could get what he wanted from the Trump Presidency was, however, misplaced. Indeed, over the past decade, he was able to extract nothing of note from America, even as his government has shaped not just its energy policies around American santions, but India’s relations generally with Russia, and with Iran, while surrendering a great deal of digital sovereignty to boot as well (as revealed in the previous post). But Modi’s flattering of Trump reached its limit when the US President virtually demanded the Indian leader endorse the American’s self-propagated case for the Nobel Peace Prize for terminating Sindoor. Had Modi given in, there was no guarantee Trump’d have kept from hosting Munir and moving the US policy Pakistan-wards. But there was every certainty the Prime Minister would have had the somewhat tenuous credit for Sindoor from being slashed from underneath him providing, at the very least, a lot of campaign fodder to the opposition in the Bihar state elections.

So, it is clear Trump has got most everything he desired from Modi, including huge multi-billion dollar purchases by Delhi of transport aircraft, P-8I maritime recon planes, and vintage M-777 mountain-use light howitzers. And, especially, the “four foundational accords” — the 2016 Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), the 2018 Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), the 2019 Industrial Security Agreement (ISA), and the 2020 Basic Exchange and Coooperation Agreement (BECA). India thus placed itself squarely in the crowded American security tent in Asia without obtaining any real security benefits and, worse, shortchanged itself in terms of negotiating leverage. Sharing of spatial digitised data vide BECA has permitted the US, for instance, an entry point into the Indian satellite communications setup, meaning it may have gained for Washington access that can be used, if its interests so dictate, to onpass critical military information to Pakistan, China, any other adversary!

The only thing the Modi regime retained for Delhi was the decision on the logistics support the US forces could avail of, but only on a case-by-case basis, and the level of participation in the military activity of the Quadrilateral of US, Japan, Australia, India. The fact that India had, in fact, got little in return for putting out with so much was evidenced in the tremendous frustration expressed by many who served in the US government about India’s not doing that little bit extra!

Of course, Delhi’s stalling tactics, and unwillingness to engage militarily in Quad Indo-Pacific operations more fully were also because Russia had to be kept in good humour both as arms supplier and as source of critical mil-tech that Washington would not part with, and as counterweight to both America and China. The US understood this as India furthering its traditional balancer role. With the Quad not pulling its weight, the Biden Administration in 2021 announced the formation of AUKUS — Australia, UK, US, an uncomfortable reminder to the peoples of the Indo-Pacific of an old world Anglo-saxon confederacy.

Now, let’s view this picture from the American angle.

Trump is a professional New York city schmoozer — who cultivated pals everywhere — no knowing when someone might be of use! — to advance his family-commercial-real estate interests. As President in his second term, he has only become more brazen in exploiting his position, leaving no opportunity unexploited to increase his personal and family wealth. This was the reason why Trump cottonned on to Asif Munir, who promised to lay Pakistan at Trump’s feet to use as he saw fit. Islamabad facilitated a crypto currency base in the country — a move to personally enrich Trump, who has invested hugely in it, and offered concessions to US mining companies to extract whatever minerals they can find in the country. And he hinted, after his 2nd White House lunch and meeting with Trump of Pakistan’s pleasure in playing the Central Asia frontier policeman and outpost for America and Western interests, and assist in curtailing China in the region. And Pakistan’s history of having its generals in the US pocket and, more formally, as a longtime American client state quickly cemented the new deal. The US has enough of a hold on the Pakistan establishment and armed forces — as it has, to be fair, on the senior-most echelons of the Indian bureaucracy, MEA, and military (with liberal entry visa/green card issuals for progeny, as well), to ensure this.

Modi was a less known commodity to Trump, but the deals he secured from the Indian PM without parting with much in exchange was because Modi wore his admiration of America and American life too much on his sleeve not to have his American counterpart exploit it to the fullest, which Trump did. All it required was for Trump to pay Modi attention, talk up their supposed “friendship” and, from the other end of his mouth, skewer the Indian Prime Minister with his insistence that it was he who stopped Op Sindoor cold, and in his latest pronouncement, that 8 aircraft were shot down in the 3-day fracas — the tally of Indian losses apparently going up everytime Trump opens his mouth! It is, in fact, Trump turning Modi’s trademark hugs and embraces inside out to string Modi along, even as he plays kitty-ball with Munir, letting slip a reference about Pakistan conducting “nuclear testing” aimed at simultaneously unsettling India and pumping up Islamabad.

What could be plainer? Well, the Panchtantra tales has precisely such cautionary story — recall the one about the monkey inserting itself between two cats squabling over a pat of butter only to have the ape, doling out a “balanced” share of the goody to each, which involved, it first divying up the butter and, in the process of balancing, taking a little from the portion of one cat and then from that of the other cat until the monkey consumed all of it! Same monkey business here, once again, which, as on earlier occasions, has ended up equating/hyphenating India and Pakistan, cutting Modi and India to Pakistan’s size and proportionately elevating Munir and Pakistan!!!

The Modi government has not learned anything after repeated humiliations heaped on the Prime Minister and insults to India. Now the Trump Administration is dangling a US presidential visit to keep Delhi on the hook. Not sure why such visits are so prized by the Indian government and why Indians generally so desire to please the US and the West, and are prepared to suffer no end of indignity, and to jump through all kinds of hoops.

The irony is that while Munir and Islamabad are entirely aware that whatever the cost to the country of playing up to Trump and the US, the benefit to Pakistan is in the deliverables by way of military assistance — especially crucial tactical military intelligence feeds in realtime that have made a difference in the past, Modi and New Delhi have deluded themselves into believing, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that it is they who are in the driver’s seat, and able to get more out of continuing to be nice to Washington!

The question to ponder is whether there’s a point in the bilateral relations beyond which the Modi regime will not allow itself to be pushed, and won’t budge? There seems to be no such point — to wit, the Free Trade Agreement being negotiated which, reportedly, has all sorts of giveaways and concessions to America. Except, there is a worrying trend for Modi, who has invested so much political capital to stay on the right side of Washington. One of the main pillars of his US policy — Indians and the NRI community in America cultivated as potential South Asia policy influencers, are under assault from Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) support base what with the techie flow channel (higher education visa = green card, Indian IT techie posting = green card) being shut down, is crumbling right before our eyes.

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India is losing its digital sovereignty. Blame the combo of Jaishankar & Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agarwal

Posted on October 30, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agarwal]]

According to sources not far removed from the policy Establishment, the 1994 Manipur cadre IAS officer and Commerce Secretary, Rajesh Agarwal, has surrendered India’s digital sovereignty by succumbing to, what else, US pressure. A draft-Free Trade Agreement (FTA) he has negotiated and awaiting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s approval, accepts the American viewpoint that India’s “digital trade barriers” are a hindrance to free trade and will have to be done away with.

Nothing in New Delhi ever remains secret for long, and the bureacratic grapevine about the arrangement to further the FTA with the US, is even more revealing. Significantly and, perhaps, with the PM’s consent, where the FTA negotiations with America are concerned, Agarwal reports NOT to his own minister, Piyush Goel, but directly to the Minister for External Affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Jaishankar, it may be recalled, has engineered the policy of appeasing Trump. And, yes, is the same person who, as Joint Secretary (Americas) in MEA and lead negotiator in 2008 of the 123 Agreement for civilian nuclear cooperation with the US, surrendered India’s sovereign right to conduct nuclear testing and to obtain a tested thermonuclear deterrent. It advanced, in the process, not the country’s interests but the longstanding American nonproliferation goal of restricting India to the low-yield fission weapon threshold.

There’s no end to how much, and how methodically, Jaishankar is stripping India of its strategic independence. The surrender of digital sovereignty now — a generous giveaway to the US, is something that American trade representatives plainly did not expect so easily to obtain. Jaishankar is the Indian government’s expert in waving the white flag before the engagement even begins and, it is hardly surprising that he wrangled the authority to shape the FTA to benefit America. Courtesy Jaishankar, Bye! Bye! India’s absolute right to thermonuclear security and now digital security. Jaishankar can plead that in 2008 he did the Prime Minister’s bidding, and that it was Manmohan Singh who demanded he secure that agreement at any cost, because it would be an economic “Open Sesame” for the country to tap into the wealthy US market and, in the bargain, to reform and liberalise its own economy. Is Jaishankar’s excuse henceforth to be that sacrificing India’s digital sovereignty is what Modi instructed him to do?

Modi and India are not in the same league as Xi and China, of course. But the contrast in the reaction of the two countries to Trump’s economic bullying could not be starker, more different. It reflects in China’s case the “long view” strategic mindedness that has always animated Chinese policies leading to its capture over the past two decades of all rare earth resources outside PLA-occupied Tibet and Xinjiang for use in case the US ever acted up. That time was now, and no sooner Trump issued a ban on advanced software and semiconductor chips to China, Xi cutoff all supply of Chinese-controlled rare earths magnets in particular — central to electric vehicles, the automobile industry and industry in general, and to the production of sophisticated American military hardware, until Trump cried Uncle! The US President’s request for a meeting with Xi is being pondered by Zhongnanhai even as Trump is getting hot under the collar! This is strict reciprocity — an immediate tit-for-tat measure that merely confirmed to Washington that it was China, and not Modi’s India, it was dealing with.

The Modi goverment, on the other hand, quickly fell in line with the ever fluctuating Trump diktat. It bought energy from Russia initially because Washington okayed it. It was misrepresented by Jaishankar among others in the government as India asserting its sovereign right to buy oil cheaply from wherever it is available. Indeed, Trump publicly declared and repeated at the recent ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur that Modi in fact ended Op Sindoor after he threatened India with “250% tariffs”, and how the Indian PM promised to zero out Russian oil imports. Sure enough, the pretence of ‘national interest’ prompting Indian oil buys from Russia lasted only until Trump sanctioned the Russian energy majors Rosneft and Lukeoil earlier this week whereupon the public sector Indian Oil and the private sector Reliance, taking their cue from the government, quickly changed tack and stopped buying Russian oil on a coin. So, the conclusion was right after all that India is suseptible to pressure on all issues and on all counts, Trump’s pressing Modi led to the Indian government terminating the oil trade with Russia.

Trying to cover the government’s tracks on preemptive compliance with the US policy changes, Jaishankar complained ineffectually about the energy import standards being unfairly imposed — China has not been so sanctioned, etc. Boo-hoo! And to squawk about the Ukraine War needing to end so India can resume oil supplies from Russia implying, note this, acceptance of the fact that Trump’s decision is what persuaded the Modi dispensation to sever India’s connection to Russian oil!! So Trump essentially decides who India buys oil from, not India’s national interest! If one part of Trump’s public declaration is correct — that his oil sanctions on Russia ended India’s Russian oil purchases, how can the other part of the same Trumpian statement issued in the same breath — that he forced an end to Sindoor be “arrant nonsense” as senior Indian officials got up the guts to label it some 5 months after the event?

Meanwhile, surprise, surprise, Indian imports of American oil shot up to nearly to half a million barrels per day, making up the projected Russian oil cutoff. The Indian government’s patent inability to look beyond its nose meant that it was not prepared to react by instantly switching its trade, except an alternative market for Indian goods was not cultivated. It placed India in its familiar role as beggar, pettitioning Trump for reduced tariffs and for a waiver of sanctions on Chabahar — the Iranian port central to India’s Afghanistan and Central Asia policy, when keeping this channel open for trade serves the US interest as well. With Washington extending its waivers, the impression of India as a client state was confirmed. Trump then bolted down this impression and worse by saying as regards Sindoor that both Munir and Modi told him that “You should let us fight”!! At a stroke it elevated Trump/US as the entity to decide whether the two countries fight at all, and personally equated Munir and Modi and, at one remove, Pakistan and India! And then cushioned the blow by calling the two countries “tough people”. REALLY!

Whatever the truth, the fact is Trump at once mocked Modi and to, blunt the sharp edge of his mockery, laid it on a bit thick on the flattery front, hoping the Indian PM can be flattered out of reacting badly as well. Trump: “I’ll tell you what, Prime Minister Modi is the nicest looking guy, [someone] you’d like to have as your father” and then added, “[Modi] is a killer,…tough as hell.” [All Trump quotes in Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “Trump says He Threatened 250% Tariffs on ‘Killer’ Modi”, Bloomberg, Oct 29, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2025-10-29/trump-says-he-threatened-250-tariffs-on-killer-modi-pakistan ]

Flattery works — who should know this better than Trump?! Succumbing to its also covers up for the Indian government’s strategic myopia — intrinsic to its decision and policy making, and is an official trait welcomed hugely by the US, the West, and China who waste no time exploiting to the max.

So the US not only dictates who India buys its energy from, who it can fight and how, but also its geopolitics!

With regard to the FDA with the US, what has Agarwal got in return for India giving up its digital sovereignty, pray? Reportedly, reduced tariffs to the 15% level!? Satisfactory, Mr. Jaishankar?

When Shakespeare’s Richard III had his horse lanced from underneath him at the Battle of Bosworth Field, his lament — “My kingdom for a horse” is apparently taken literally as a negotiating strategy by Messrs Jaishankar and Agarwal — who, between them, have, in fact, given away strategic India for a song!

The Polish sociologist Stanislaw Andrezki aptly described India as a “land of subjugations”, but know this, that in the nuclear-digital age that is upon us, foreign subjugation is actually internalised and mainstreamed in the manner Jaishankar has done in gutting India’s thermonuclear weapons, and now his bureaucratic tool, Agarwal, is doing in kicking India’s digital sovereignty over the side, vide negotiated accords, albeit accompanied by rousing nationalist rhetoric on the sidelines voiced by Modi, Rajnath Singh and assorted others. Cry, the beloved country (the title of Alan Paton’s sorrowful account of his benighted homeland — the apartheid-ridden South Africa, that now fits the 21st century to-date India to a T, but for quite different reasons)!

Agarwal’s resume’ refers to an MA from IIFT (Indian Institute of Foreign Trade) run on subventions from Commerce Ministry. That makes him, unusual for GOI, a round peg in a round hole. But, does he understand even a bit of the digital world he has to have a grasp of? Assuming he does, the trouble is in the talks to hammer out an FTA with the US, he is taking his marching orders from Jaishankar — a generalist with no known specialisation other than international affairs (JNU) but with talent for an aphoristic turn of phrase — useful in a diplomat, but not essential, and a pronounced tilt US-ward, evidenced in his career in MEA. So, lack of domain knowledge bothers Jaishankar little, as long as the negotiation is tending in the direction of the Big Tech Companies — almost all American, which is what Agarwal is meant to ensure.

But what’s digital sovereignty all about?

No country in recent times has been as profligate as India in gifting away the technology space and space for technological growth and development with indigenous talent and resources within the country. The government sector does not seem to be even aware of what’s at stake. Take the example of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) — a single platform for all financial transactions described as a “unique achievement and only sovereign digital ecosystem winning worldwide appreciation” according to one assessement by experts. News reports suggest that NPCI is teaming up with OpenAI — the leading US Artificial Intelligence firm — talk of getting the fox into the henhouse! — OpenAI could then weaponise the platform, unbenownst to NCPI, and discover one day, as Nayara Energy — the Indo-Russian oil refining and marketing company did, that Microsoft hired to provide services, shutdown Nayara operations without any notice! This is but a taste of what may be in the offing by being reckless in allowing big tech companies entry into the Indian milieu. Imagine the disruptive power Washington would wield through the agency of OpenAI over the Indian economy should this collaborative venture take off! The Modi PMO should instruct NCPI to void the deal immedately and kick OpenAI out of its premises before any real harm is done. In fact, no Indian LLM (large language model) under development should be allowed any foreign connection for any reason. And that guardrail has to be erected as of yesterday!

Nayara Energy is but one instance, of the Indian government allowing a noose to be placed around NCPI. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is actually working with Indian government tech incubators to guarantee that the next IP (Internet protocol) model is erected on AWS platform! Talk of lacking any common sense, leave alone displaying tech competence. The US-led West and China, moreover, have been relentless in compromising the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This is no bad thing to happen because under its aegis the Indian government has surrendered “significant industrial policy space”. The threat to undermine it would be enough during this WTO crisis for India to win back this space. Instead, the Commerec Ministry has made concessions on source code access — India cannot anymore demand source codes for any capital hardware purchase, including in a license production deal, cross-border data flows, open government data, compulsory licensing, and asymmetrical access to government procurement — most of them made during Agarwal’s time as Commerce Secretary.

Movement of skilled labour is a big agenda point for Modi to consolidate his electoral hold on the growing Middle Class, but even when the US and European states have conceded this point, it has not stopped Trump, say, from closing the H1B visa channel, or protecting the rights and the physical wellbeing of Indian techies working in America, what with MAGA gunning for them and for any ethnic Indian, in fact. But this seamless flow of skilled labour surely cannot explain, leave alone justify yielding on the country’s “core digital interests”. Rather than using Indian brainpower, as the abovementioned assessment says, “as leverage ” we are actually allowing the US and the West through their Big Tech Companies to pay them with what they most want from India — high-tech manpower hires to assist them in digitally colonising India.

The US is, moreover, insisting on provisions in the FTA that prevent “(1) India from imposing taxes on digital players headquartered in the US, (2) India from leveraging its data advantage and creating national digital champions, including through sharing anonymised government data exclusively with Indian domestic entities, and (3) India from effectively regulating the digital sector.”

How does all of this serve the National Interest, Modiji??

The US, according to those who have knowledge of trade negotiations, “can secure the above and many other [insidious] objectives in the digital sector by getting India to agree to JUST THIS ONE SENTENCE in the trade accord: Both countries agree to grant non-discriminatory treatment to digital services, and suppliers of these services, from the other country.” It cannot be allowed to be inserted/included in the FTA text — and Agarwal better be alert to any variations on this theme being brought into the working draft document.

The homework has already been done by well-meaning Indian entities desirous of protecting the country’s sovereignty and digital space in its entirety that people like Jaishankar have made playthings of. The pity is Prime Minister Modi does not seem to quite appreciate the looming digital danger staring the country in the face. He seems happy to give audience to Sundar Pichai of Microsoft and Satya Nadella of Google/Alphabet in the expectation that these India-origin types will think of India’s interest, when, in reality, these NRIs, as the Indian government, ought to have realised by now are worse than useless in speaking up for India and its interests, what to speak of advancing them.

Recall that with Trump’s punitive policies at a high pitch not a single NRI notable spoke up for India; many of them actually argued that India had a “bad narrative” on Op Sindoor they couldn’t possibly propagate, when the truth is the Indian techies in America are fair weather sailors, happy to board the Indian ship, join in Howdy Modi! kind of circuses in America, but just a bit of headwind gets them into a tizzy and into a “distanced from India”-mode. India owes them nothing. The Nadellas and the Pichais of the world look out for themselves and the US firms they head, especially when the bottomline suggests that “the potential gains of a digital sovereignty framework could be in the trillions of dollars [for India] as compared to a few billions invested [in India]” by these foreign entities.

And if the United States of America is Modi’s great model to emulate, perhaps, the Prime Minister and his minders should look at how the Trump government has moved to impose sovereign oversight on foreign companies, like Tik Tok. It ringfenced it from its Chinese parent, subjected its algorithm use to domestic control/royalties, and confined sensitive operations to ‘transparent’ clean rooms” thus ensuring foreign tech companies “comply with national rules when governments act decisively.”

Ironic then that this is the US that insists the presumably free, independent and sovereign Republic of India not take steps needed to guard its own sovereign digital space and industry in every way possible in the manner Washington has done to protect its digital environment. And, more alarmingly, that this is the United States of America dictating to the Modi government to leave “Digital India” open to “free trade” and extremely vulnerable to American companies, and to other international predators.

The digital peril Messrs Jaishankar and Rajesh Agarwal have deliberately, and with great forethought, put the Indian nation in, suggests that Digital Sovereignty is no part of the Indian government’s thinking on internal or external security. The supposedly hypernationalist regime that Narendra Modi runs in New Delhi is seemingly OK with all this.

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Chances of Modi being made a monkey

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Modi and Trump]

The 47th summit of the 10-member ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) and five dialogue partners — India, Japan, South Korea, US, and China is set to begin in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, October 26. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be attending, as will US President Donald Trump. The MEA hopes that the two can meet on the sidelines. What the ASEAN expects to get out of this conference is Trump’s promise to reduce US tariffs.

The Indian government, which has no sense or instinct for US domestic politics or American foreign policy, has in mind something more ambitious. Modi means to use the occasion to turn on his charm and try and put the derailed bilateral ties back on track, and otherwise to convince Trump about the wrong path he has taken by befriending Munir and Company at India’s expense.

This effort has about as much chance of success as a spitball’s in hell!

In fact, there is every reason to expect that Trump will exchange some inanities with Modi, mention their warm friendship a couple of times, and agree with Modi on issues a, b, and c, only to come out to the waiting media and announce that Modi had approved x, y and z, involving matters the two leaders never touched on! And that’s the danger no leader can avoid when meeting Trump. But Modi has lots more to lose than the run of the mill European leaders massaging his ego.

Trump’s trademark diplomatic method of confusing, inventing issues out of thin air, bamboozling the world, and forcing the leader he has lately been with to scramble and backpedal, and generally to be on the defensive, pleading that something else all together was actually discussed. It is as unique as Modi’s equally familiar opening with hugs and embraces that have by now grown stale, lost its element of novelty and surprise. Trump has time and again bet on the fact that India wants more from the US than America seeks from India, and the difference is what, he thinks, provides him with the leverage and the latitude to sculpt a narrative designed to show him as beating up on a difficult and recalcitrant India.

Modi and his MEA minders should ensure that the Indian PM never again agrees to any one-on-one meetings with Trump, even less a joint Press conference — the US President’s favourite stomping ground!

Fiction and sheer invention being Trump’s diplomatic oeuvre, Modi is at a distinct disadvantage with the Western media, and why I have been warning against the Indian PM meeting with Trump alone at any time for any reason. Because that only offers the American another opportunity to make a monkey out of Modi. Trump’s diplomacy was recently on display when he loudly claimed the Indian Prime Minister had promised to terminate all energy imports from Russia when, as the MEA was at pains to point out, Modi had undertaken to do no such thing. On Sept 16, Trump called to offer Modi birthday greetings, and on Oct 22 Diwali Greetings!

No publicly personal relationship has quite crashed and burned as the ties between Modi and Trump did, post-Sindoor, with the latter making it a point to insult the Indian PM and go full-punitive against India and all because the latter would not, pet cockatoo-like or, more appropriately, Field Marshal Asim Munir-like, roll over and parrot to the Press the US President’s worthiness for the Nobel Peace Prize for ending Op Sindoor and, nonsensically, saving the world from a nuclear armageddon!

In retrospect, Modi made the gravest strategic error by calling the White House after the Indian missiles had been fired at the terrorist facilities in Muridke and Bahawalpur on May 7 to inform the US President that the Indian strikes were limited retaliation for the Pahalgam massacre.

Why did Modi feel compelled, besides Jaishankar putting him up to it, to inform Trump at all? The US National Security Agency — the largest most technologically advanced and powerful intelligence agency in the world whose satellites would have picked up the Indian missile firings and relayed it instantly to the NSA processing centre outside Washington DC via the Australian relay station at Pine Gap, outside Alice Springs and, with a time lag of just a few minutes, reached Trump. So Modi was telling him nothing he did not already know. But the act of Modi telling him is what marked India out in the pecking order as a subsidiary power trying to preempt Trump from lashing out. It did not work.

Not sure why Modi feels it imperative to please the US President, when Trump insults and humiliates in return. Because going strictly by his transactionalist tilt, it is Trump’s America that will be hard put strategically to replace India in the Indo-Pacific, to economically find a market as vast as India’s to sell to, and to replenish its STEM talent pool with year-on-year hordes of incoming Indian graduates from IITs and regional engineering colleges that provide state-subsidised education that American companies polish up. Indian talent has fueled the Silicon Valley’s rise and helped the US remain on top of the technology mountain.

And yet it is India and Modi that act the supplicant when they hold more cards than Delhi credits itself with. Trump’s cabinet colleagues are beginning to realise this and why India cannot be bullied into a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) or anything else, or force it away from buying Russian military hardware — more S-400s and possibly also the Su-57 multi-role combat aircraft (after the fiasco the French Rafale turned out to be in Sindoor, leading to whole squadrons being restricted to faroff tarmacs). And why India will continue to buy oil from Russia, soon from the Arctic Sea reserves as well — and Trump can go take a hike! Have you seen how all the loud mouths talking trash to India — Counselor to Trump, Peter Navarro, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have gone silent?

But Trump is motivated foremost by pecuniary benefits to self and family, and here the burgeoning market for high end luxury apartments/villas with the Trump stamp — the characteristic goldish blingy garishness, offers Delhi direct leverage. The Wall Street Journal the other day carried a newsreport that proclaimed India as the “Trump Organisation’s biggest foreign market for real estate projects”. Trump is raking in the moolah (some $12 million in 2024) for simply lending his name to real estate developers in Gurgaon and elsewhere in the National Capital Region (NCR) — among them Pankaj, Roop and Basant Bansal (and their M3M Group), the Lodha Group, and the RDB Group in Kolkatta, most of them, unsurprisingly, in trouble with the law on charges of money laundering, securities fraud, bribery, tax evasion, and/or defrauding customers.

May be the best way to impress Trump would be to darken the prospects of his family’s 12 new NCR real estate development projects that have been anounced, by dragging these Indian real estate developers deeper into a legal morass and begin, for instance, by restricting the flow of license fees on these new projects to the Trumps. As many investigations have shown, like the Indian developers he consorts with, Trump too has had serious run ins with the law. Better still, the Indian Tax and Enforcement Division, and Haryana state police and other agencies, can begin turning on the heat until these Trump-friendly Indian developers start squealing and, the Bansals, who are supposed to be in thick with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, ask Modi to treat them with kindness, and approach Eric Trump, the President’s son, fronting the Trump enterprise, to have his father talk to Modi for relief that can then be doled out in spoonfuls to keep the Trumps hanging. It will give the Indian PM and government the much needed upper hand.

Posted in arms exports, asia-Pacific/Indo-Pacific, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, corruption, Culture, Decision-making, Defence procurement, domestic politics, Europe, Geopolitics, geopolitics/geostrategy, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Ocean, Indo-Pacific, Japan, MEA/foreign policy, Military Acquisitions, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, technology, self-reliance, Terrorism, United States, US. | Tagged , , , , | 20 Comments

Modi Government’s death blow to Indian defence industry & IAF chief’s fantastical claims — 2 Notes

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Heavy Vehicles Factory, Avadi]

This is what a pink paper, not known for criticism of government policies, said on Oct 3 about the Modi regime’s move to allow Indian subsidiaries of foreign arms manufacturing corporations to bid for defence procurement contracts as Indian entities. “In a move that could severely undercut India’s domestic defence industry, the Modi government is considering allowing wholly owned local subsidiaries of foreign original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to qualify as ‘Indian vendors’ in defence procurement. This long-pending demand of multinational arms makers, discussed by a special task force led by former cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba, threatens to hand the lucrative defence market to global giants while sidelining homegrown firms. Instead of strengthening indigenous manufacturing, the government appears set to empower foreign corporations at the expense of Indian companies, raising questions about its oft-repeated rhetoric of Atmanirbhar Bharat.” (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/govt-likely-to-recognise-foreign-defence-companies-local-arms-as-indian/articleshow/124278267.cms)

The instant conversion of a foreign company into an Indian one that foreign equipment manufacturers have been clamouring for just so they can crowd the genuinely home-grown Indian companies out of the bids for military hardware, is recommended by a taskforce chaired by Gauba, whose tangential exposure to defence issues was as a young IAS officer appointed private secretary to defence minister George Fernandes in the late 1970s. It means, essentially, that he is another successful babu, our very own “Sir Humphrey” (from that BBC comedic takeoff on the British civil service — “Yes, Prime Minister!”), who has next to no domain expertise in defence and national security but does fine winging it in all policy areas, just so things don’t change very much! And a policy failure is portrayed as roaring success!

It is exactly the sort of civil servant Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have a liking for even if what Gauba advises be done will gut especially the Indian private sector defence industry that is still at the takeoff stage because it has been prevented from actually taking off by the BJP government’s atmnirbharta policies that promote only superficial arms self-sufficiency.

That Modi, like Gauba, cannot distinguish between “Made in India” — where the entire weapon system is designed, developed, and produced in the country, and “Make in India” where any foreign goods can be imported in disaggregated kit-form and assembled or screw-drivered — something the Defence public sector units — HAL, Mazgaon, the Avadi tank factory, et al, have been doing for the past 70 years, was pointed out by me way back in 2015 or thereabouts when the PM started talking about atmnirbharta without detailing his agenda. 11 years later we know what that means.

It is not that Modi (or a Gauba) does not understand the difference, but that he is into taking a shortcut for a policy that far from making the country atm nibhar will drive it further into foreign arms dependency while sounding the deathknell for worldclass private sector companies that have come up — not because of, but despite, the government. The L&Ts, Godrej Aerospace’s, Bharat Forge’s, Mahindra, and hundreds of other large firms and SMSEs that produce components, ancillaries, and sub-assemblies that have together built nuclear submarines, complex space systems and what not, now find themselves up a creek, even as the state-funded DPSUs who are corporatised only in name and wouldn’t survive a day were they to actually compete with L&T, Bharat Forge, and so on, prosper.

But Modi, a couple of months back, publicly disclosed what he meant by atm nirbhar — his “Make in India” policy, he said, involves “Indian toil”. So, for the PM it is enough that Indians employed in these Indian factories of foreign arms companies, being set up here in the hope of getting the exact bonanza they are getting now, will be screwdrivering vintage second rate military hardware the Indian military seems to be enamoured by. So, at least, the country should have no illusion that it is getting anything more than an ersatz arms self-sufficiency. And the contracts these foreign companies masquerading as Indian firms will generate will be but a channel to divert national wealth into defence industries abroad, but now indirectly! But, this policy wrinkle will simplify procurement by bypassing the “jhanjat” of tech transfer. So nothing has changed, will change! This is next generation reform.

It is clear why the Gauba Task Force on “next gen reforms” was constituted — mainly to provide justification for a policy that already had Modi’s stamp — the policy in the PM’s words of “GLOCAL” — GLObal + loCAL! Hurray, Go Glocal!!

There would be NO problem at all if foreign arms producers established their manufacturing units here to avail of lower labour and running costs, produce military goods exclusively and strictly for EXPORT. But now when this policy is implemented, the local private sector defence industry — the sharp edge, will suffer the proverbial double whammy. It will not be able to underbid these foreign-companies in Indian guise in deals from the Indian armed services, and the armed services will indent for major weapons platforms directly in g2g (govt-to-govt) deals with foreign countries because there’s no restriction to their global tendering. That’s how a whole bunch of exorbitantly priced items made their way into the Indian order of battle — Rafale aircraft, Scorpene diesel submarines, T-90 tanks, and similar ridiculous buys whose sell-by date has long since expired.

Welcome to India — the dumping ground for antique Western weaponry, and at humoungous hit to the national exchequer! But India is a rich country with a $21.87 trillion economy (in Purchasing Power Parity terms) per International Monetary Fund data — the third wealthiest in the world (after China and the US), don’t you know!

Anytime the Government of India ends up doing the country’s national security apparatus real harm, there’s always a government commission, committee, or taskforce providing the road map, that it can blame for things going wrong. That dirty work is now being done by the Gauba Taskforce that has striven to kick the legs from underneath the halfway, half-hearted effort mounted so far by the Modi regime to have the country become a supposedly militarily significant power propped up by a hollow indigenous defence industrial might.

Surely, in the Gauba taskforce report the case will be elaborately made about out how and why foreign arms companies permitted entry into the Indian market through such means will ultimately help Indian defence industry “mature” and thrive. There will be lots of technical business jargon, and colourful “pies” and venn diagrams — stuff Modi likes in the presentations made to him. And very likely that part of the report will be authored by someone called Janmeya Sinha, chairman, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), India. BCG is a major consultancy hired by American defence companies when they make their sales pitches to the Pentagon. The Indian station of the BCG now is part of the Indian government’s decision making to ease the entry of US companies into the Indian defence sector. Can there be a more obvious Trojan Horse that we are pulling right into our battlement? Guess whose instructions the Indian branches of Lockeed, General Atomics, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northop Grumman, etc. will follow? Government of India’s/Indian Defence Ministry’s or Washington’s — and that too, Trump’s America???

But this turn in India’s defence economics of putting the foreign fox — BCG — in the Indian hen house — India’s defence procurement decisionmaking process, seems by now quite routine. There’s no ministry or Department of the Government of India that has not recruited one of these Western consultancy firms — Mckinsey & Co., Pricewater-houseCoopers (PwC), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, Ernst & Young Global Limited and KPMG International Limited, to tell them what they already know but want the imprimatur of foreign consultants. In the period 2017-2022, 308 consultancy assignments valued at some Rs 500 crore from various government ministries, departments and organisations, are in the books. (https://indianexpress.com/article/express-exclusive/in-5-years-16-ministries-gave-rs-500-crore-work-to-big-five-consultants-9018061/) This is a new kind of scam the Indian government is now a willing partner in. It begets the kind of situation the country had until recently when the Department of Telecommuications was a Huawei fort inside the BSNL and government.

But this development seems in the mainstream of the Modi government’s recent initiatives that see nothing wrong in signing Free Trade Agreements left and right drawn up by that shortsighted commerce minister, Piyush Goel, and his bunch of babus, with provisions in them to permit British and European companies to bid for all Indian government procurement contracts at the central, state and local levels worth $750 billion annually, which will void the Indian industry. There are other provisions in them that will bar Indian entities from demanding the transfer of source codes as part of sales deals to enable the re-engineering, say, of weapons and other systems for retrofitment on imported hardware and weapons platforms, to fit India’s needs and requirements. Hence, Dassault Avions’ refusal to part with source codes for the Rafale aircraft means that DRDO cannot integrate Indian designed and produced missiles and ordnance into the IAF Rafales. And even for the most minor modifications the IAF will have to go to the French company — an endless revenue stream for Dassult! Apparently Paris had alerted the French defence industry to New Delhi’s agreeing to such provisions in the soon to be formalised FTA with EU (and also with the UK and the US).

Is there to be no end to India’s sucker-hood? Apparently not, because Modi’s atmnirbharta policies are cementing India’s reputation as a classic sucker, the yokel who time and again is taken for a ride! But worse, considering this trend of foreign elements dictating the course of the nation’s security, economic, commercial, and trade policies, and everything else, India can’t be far from full-blown Banana Republic status.

——–

[ACM AP Singh, Chief of the Air Staff, in the Tejas cockpit]

Three months after Operation Sindoor, Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh, just the other day came out with the fantastical claim that the IAF had shot down/shot up/destroyed as many as 12 to 13, even 15, Pakistani military aircraft, ranging from F-16 and JF-17 fighter planes, C-130 transporters, to the Saab Erieye airborne early warning aircraft, besides damaging numerous PAF air bases and radar installations while, ironically, rubbishng Pakistani claims of IAF losses as so much fiction. Why he suddenly woke up this late in the day to voice such patent nonsense, is not clear.

If it was IAF’s belated attempt to challenge the successful Pakistani narrative pushed by Field Marshal Asim Munir that convinced US President Donald Trump — the wrecking ball bringing down the bloated US government, who was inclined any way to give the benefit of doubt — if there was any, to Pakistan about just how the three day “WAR” panned out, it failed! Trump has repeatedly stated publicly that 5 to 7 IAF were lost in that operation.

This is credible information because, as I keep iterating, the Indian government and military are so fully penetrated through human intelligence, electronic intel, and most importantly, and so transparent because of the high resolution 24/7/365 satellite imagery, especially from low earth orbit satellites with sub-10 cm resolution that can spot a football from space. Do you reckon, Washington does not know in excruciating detail just how many aircraft and air bases were shot up in either India or Pakistan? Are aircraft, Brahmos missile, drones and loitering munitions not bigger than a football?

So, even if we believe nothing else the US President says, one can trust what Trump said about IAF losses. If the Air HQ knows better, now is the time for AP Singh to furnish the evidence to contradict Trump’s figures, and to back his own claims of the destruction of 12-15 PAF aircraft — any photo imagery, satellite imagery (even if nowhere reaching the minute resolution levels of the US Kh-11 ‘Big Bird’ optical intel satellite constellation), infrared thermal imagery, sensor reads, signals intercepts, absolutely anything to prove the Air Chief Marshal was right, will do. But, of course, no such proof or evidence will be provided. This only doubles the mystery about why such ludicrous claims were made at this time.

The air chief said he would not help out the Pakistanis by releasing information about Indian losses in Sindoor. Ummm! So he thinks the Americans won’t give it to GHQ, Rawalpindi? And then he wondered if there was even a single photo evidence of a downed IAF aircraft, when actually there is –hasn’t he seen the Rafale debris video from a Bhatinda native — it is there, available on the internet. In the day of mobile telephony it is always better to say nothing, than to open your mouth and get immediately refuted.

AP Singh’s boast of a 300 km deep “kill” within Pakistan and of radar suppression is, however, more believable — but some evidence will be helpful, if only to inspire confidence that when the Indian military brass speak, they are not always serving up dollops of “khyali pulao”! And when thrown a dolly about declining squadron strength, the IAF chief promptly talked of 114 more Rafale, what else! Yea, the same Rafale, whose high-value Spectra avionics and electronic warfare suit laid such a big egg in Sindoor. The same Rafale whose source codes are unavailable, so DRDO is unable to retroactively mesh Indian missiles with its fire control system. So, a fleet of this frightfully expensive and intrinsically flawed aircraft is going to go up against the Chinese Air Force? Good Luck!

Posted in arms exports, asia-Pacific/Indo-Pacific, Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, corruption, Culture, Decision-making, Defence Industry, Defence procurement, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, geopolitics/geostrategy, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indo-Pacific, Intelligence, Islamic countries, MEA/foreign policy, Military Acquisitions, Military/military advice, Missiles, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, satellites, society, South Asia, space & cyber, Technology transfer, technology, self-reliance, United States, US., war & technology, Weapons, Western militaries | Tagged , , , , | 42 Comments

Pakistan now squarely in Israel’s crosshairs

Posted on September 21, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Pakistani Shaheen III MRBM]

Talk of volunteering one’s neck for the Israeli chopping block! Pakistan has gone and done it.

At least two things, known for quite some time now, have come out of the nuclear closet. Firstly, that Saudi Arabia has finally owned up, formalised an arrangement with a nuclear proxy. Having financed Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and missile technology from China in the 1980s, Riyadh is now asserting its seignorial rights to the Pakistani Bomb but cleverly putting Pakistan up as its nuclear front man to face Israeli ire. And secondly, that it is, in fact, what was always claimed for it but mostly by foreign analysts — an “Islamic Bomb”, meaning that it will be at the service of shia and sunni rulers alike, enlarging in a very real sense the role of Jinnah’s “New Medina” as the literal protector of the Prophet’s estate — the old “Medina” spreading over South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and the Maghreb.

The statements by an Iranian general and Pakistani ministers support just such a reading. “Pakistan has told us that if Israel uses nuclear missiles, we will also attack it with nuclear weapons.” So declared Mohesen Rezai, Senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general to the Press in Tehran (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/121873943.cms). Pakistan defence minister Khwaja Asif dilated on the topic some more. “We have not named any country whose attack would automatically trigger a retaliatory response”, he stated coyly. “This is an umbrella arrangement offered to one another by both sides…not an aggressive pact”, he clarified. “This agreement will not be hegemonical arrangement…We don’t have any plans to conquer territory or attack anyone” — which must come as a relief to someone — but who, it isn’t at all clear! Further, he described offering its nuclear weapons to other Islamic states as a “fundamental right”, and “sacred duty” to protect the holy Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia. Not to be outspoken by a cabinet colleague, foreign minister Ishaq Dar disclosed, more mysteriously, that “some other countries want to enter into an agreement of this nature.” Abbas then topped of by going overboard. “What we have, our capabilities, will absolutely be available under this pact” to the regime of the Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, before iterating Pakistan’s bonafides as a “a responsible nuclear power” — a status, he claimed, has “never” been challenged. So all the regular N-sabre rattling emanating from west of the Radcliffe Line must be sounds of one hand clapping — do you hear it?!

It is plain that it was Riyadh that put Pakistan upto it — though the grand opportunity to project Pakistan’s “power” in the Islamic world and beyond must have appealed strongly to Asif Munir FM, because he is thus annointed the “Guardian of Mecca and Medina”! That such a treaty has been in the works for a while now is a load of nonsense. A couple of things happened that made Salman want a nuclear weapon at his beck and call: The Israeli air strike on the Hamas leadership in Qatar carried out with Trump’s consent, showed that the “good faith” notions cementing the September 2020 Abrahamic Accords between Israel, UAE and Bahrain that Trump orchestrated his first time around, has come unglued. Indeed, Trump now wants to expand these Accords to include Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon. That won’t succeed. What Riyadh has realised is Israel can’t be stopped, and America is only a bystander once Tel Aviv decides to act. In the event, Salman apparently believes that having a live nuclear option offers him better leverage with the US and in the region than relying on Trump’s word, which counts for nothing — a view his “good friend” Modi no doubt now agrees with! That was the fun part for Munir and Pakistan.

Now comes the hard part – MOSSAD!

Ever since the news got out in the Eighties — I was the vehicle for this bit of news being made public, courtesy my chance meeting in the Kiryat Shimona kibbutz during the June 1982 Lebanon War with the redoubtable Major General Aharon Yaariv, former Head of Military Intelligence — that Israel, in cooperation with India, had almost pulled off the bombing of the Pakistani nuclear weapons labs at Kahuta in early 1982.

General Yaariv, who cut his teeth in the pre-Israel paramilitary, Haganah, in 1948, at the age of 63 was called up from the Reserve for active duty, for the Israeli advance into Lebanon. He relayed to me the details of the planned joint Indo-Israeli air strike operation that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi pulled out of at the last minute, creating no end of frustration in Tel Aviv. Yaariv, who directed the mission to hunt down and execute the killers of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, was exasperated as hell, telling me, as I remember vividly, that India doesn’t seem to know its own interests. Who is to say he was wrong? The Indian goverment is like that only!

Incidentally, the Kahuta op was to be a near repeat of the Israeli strike to take out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear power reactor — Osiraq, near Baghdad in June 1981, an attack ordered by PM, Menachim Begin. It too involved F-16s for ordnance delivery, and F-15s flying escort, and was to be staged out of Jamnagar and Udhampur.

It put the fear of Allah in Pakistan army Generals, because thereafter they began making representations to the Israeli government saying the Pakistani nuclear weapons would under no circumstances be used for other than against India. It was during Parvez Musharraf’s tenure as COAS and then President that Pakistan’s efforts to reassure the Israelis were at their strongest.

Neither Tel Aviv nor Mossad was ever convinced, however. Now with Salman flaunting his finger on the Pakistani nuclear weapons, and Rezaei in Tehran sounding off, guess who has been pushed up and centre into Mossad’s crosshairs?

Munir and cohort don’t quite know, to mix metaphors, the noose they have stuck their necks into. Watch out, and consider the ingenious ways other than the more straightforward tactics, the Israelis will now be mobilising against them. They would be well advised to at least become familiar with the methods that may be used to eliminate the more prominent among them who had a hand in this decision, along with the leading scientists and engineers working for the Strategic Plans Division, Chaklala. Strange things may begin to happen! Field Marshal sahab, order your copy fast of ‘Rise and Kill First’ — Mossad’s operational motto, and the title of a book by Ronen Bergman, on targeted Israeli assassinations! Some of these kill ops were nursed over years.

Israel is not India, Mossad is not RAW, and Benjamin Netanyahu is not Narendra Modi. Expect action.

Good Luck, Pakistan army flag rankers! You’ll need it.

Posted in asia-Pacific/Indo-Pacific, Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, corruption, Decision-making, Geopolitics, geopolitics/geostrategy, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indo-Pacific, Intelligence, Internal Security, Iran and West Asia, Islamic countries, Israel, MEA/foreign policy, Military/military advice, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, society, South Asia, Terrorism, United States, US., West Asia | Tagged , , , , | 39 Comments

IAF and the French Defence industry

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

You can never go wrong under-estimating the Indian Air Force and the Indian government’s strategic foresight. They prove this again and again until now when attaching the adjective ‘strategic’ to any defence-related decision they take, is to stray into oxymoron territory.

Why? Well, consider just the following two cases.

Three weeks back we learnt from defence minister Rajnath Singh that the French jet engine maker, Safran (earlier Snecma) would help India design and develop its own jet engine — no, not by building on the Kaveri 35VS engine that produced 81 kiloNewtons (kN) of thrust in a dry test — which, incidentally, is some 9kN more than the 73kN thrust developed by the engines on the Rafales flying with the IAF currently. And, notwithstanding some Rupees 20 BILLION the country has sunk into the Kaveri project, including setting up the impressive jet engine facility at the GTRE (Gas Turbine Research Establishment), Bengaluru. But rather by forking over $10 BILLION to Safran for passing off the Snecma M88-4 engine with some tinkering, as some new fangled power plant for the Tejas 1A and Mk2.

Except, the M88 is a design product of the 1970s, that is, it is an over 50 year OLD jet engine!

The defence minister very proudly declared that the indigenous twin-engined advanced medium combat aircraft (AMCA) would be powered by this engine. Sure its power is going to be increased to 120kN but on the same old design. In other words, by the time the AMCA — a supposedly 5th generation aircraft is airborne realistically no earlier than 2040, the engine it will be outfitted with will already be 70+ years old!!!

Why is soooooooo wrong a decision not obvious to the Defence Ministry and Government of India?!!!

Well, if the old turbofan technology is what the IAF and defence ministry were satisfied with, then why did they turn down the joint proposal by the Indian industrial giants — Larsen & Toubro and Godrej Aerospace to develop the Kaveri Derivative Engine (KDE) with 75 kN thrust for the Tejas 1A and a 98kN version for the Tejas Mk-2, predicated on their accessing all Kaveri source codes, testing data, and design and structural knowledge? The KDE proposes to incorporate, moreover, the afterburner tech developed by Godrej in collaboration with Brahmos Aerospace and a prototype is here, meaning it would be an ALL INDIAN jet engine from start to finish, or isn’t that what the Modi government wants? It will void relying on the American GE 404 and GE414 engines whose flow is susceptible to America’s geopolitical interests of the moment. Consider that between 2021 when the contract was signed for the GE 404 and now, exactly one or two engines have been delivered, along with no end of excuses! Indeed, Godrej AS have already delivered two fully operational 48kN dry thrust turbofan engines for the longrange Ghatak drone (unamanned combat aerial vehicle), displaying its tech mastery plus its promise that it can scale up its capability to manufacture 98kN jet engines to power the Tejas Mk2. In any case, KDE is the way to go for India to become a jet engine maker.

For a government that incessantly crows about atmnirbharta, NOT trusting Indian private sector companies in the military tech sector is incomprehensible, while TRUSTING GE and Safran, whose interest is in stringing India along, not in making it self suffcient. In this regard, there are two reasons why the choice of Safran as partner is mighty suspicious. It had a consultancy-collaboration contract to help get the Kaveri over the hump with the help of Snecma M88 engine technolgies. And this was part of the 2015 offsets deal! (So we know how offsets are treated by foreign companies. In fact, I know of many of these firms including the cost of “seminars”, trips for Indian military personnel, etc as part of the offsets!!) Except that contract collapsed two years later because GTRE accused Snecma of reneging on the transfer of critical technology that was promised and contracted for! So, the latest deal with Safran is a double payment — it pocketed its part of the contract for the 36 Rafale in 2016, and now gets another $10 billion to transfer the technology it was supposed to in 2016 but did not!

This leads to the second factor — France’s utmost reluctance to part with technology. French defence companies, recently publicly upbraided the German submarine Thyssen Krupp Marine company for offering the source codes for its HDW 214 submarine for the Indian navy’s Project 75i — another boondoggle (we will get to it another time)! They were upset that Thyssen would set a precedent, and they too’d be compelled to do the same thing in the future. But here the Indian government came to the rescue of French, German, and every other Western supplier. The Free Trade Agreement the Piyush Goel-led commerce ministry negotiated with the UK and is negotiating with the EU and the US, permits Western supplier firms to deny transfer of source codes for their wares!

To get back to the M88. It is OLD tech. The latest advances in jet engine design and technology — the Variable Cycle Engine (VCE) that will soon be equipping modern combat aircraft is in its final stages of development in many leading countries. The VCE is distinguished by the fact that its turbofans rotate at different speeds enabling the optimising of fuel efficiency and thrust in subsonic, transonic and supersonic flight modes. The M88 and other engines of that generation and their variants had to be designed to optimise either thrust or fuel efficiency, they could not have both. With VCE you do.

Two foreign companies were in the running for the engine deal — Rolls Royce of the UK, and Safran. The curious thing is that Rolls Royce, it is said, promised the VCE but over a longer time span because it is still under development. France-Safran has no such underway project, and is into extending the life of the basic M88 design as much as possible, and which design improvements now will be subsidised by the Indian taxpayer with the $10 billion payout! Safran originally offered only 50% tech transfer but matched Rolls Royce after the latter offered 100% tech transfer with source codes, et al. On the source codes, despite Indian government pressure, Dassault did not relent on transferring Rafale source codes. Hence integrating Indian missiles and other armaments on the Rafale aircraft, is impossible. Dassault is angling for separate contracts to integrate specific Indian weapons! There go more billions of dollars into Dassault account! Why because no one in the Indian defence ministry had the wit to include transfer of source codes in the original contract.

Sure, Britain is an American hanger-on trying to humour Trump by doing things like having King Charles entertain him soon at the Windsor Castle to massage his ego just so he reduces the tariffs on British exports! And yes the bad experience, for instance, with the British Sea King anti-submarine warfare helicopters with the Indian Navy may have influenced the decision to go with Safran. Sea Kings were instantly grounded when the US imposed sanctions on India for the 1998 nuclear tests, because the rotary aircraft had American Pratt & Whitney engines. But the record shows that France is no more trustworthy.

Recall that in the 1982 Falklands War, the Argentine Navy operated the Super Etendard armed with the anti-ship AS 39 Exocet cruise missile. After the Argentines sank the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Sheffield (on May 4) as also several landing ships not long after the establishment of the British naval blackade on April 30, London asked Paris for the performance parameters and other design details of the Exocet, which the French promptly handed over. It helped the British to neutralise the Exocet — there were no further sinkings of RN ships. The point is there is no guarantee of what France may do by way of informing adversary nations about their hardware in Indian employ. Not, of course, that the Indian military has any secrets — just about every weapon system used by the armed services has a Western or Russian pedigree. And weapons platforms wholly of Indian design, like the Tejas light combat aircraft, are actively disfavoured by the services. And lest there be any misunderstanding, the Tejas LCA was imposed on the IAF by the Modi government.

But having done the right thing by the Tejas, the government went ahead and torpedoed the plane’s chances by handing the full production contract over to the defence public sector unit HAL — supposedly a “navratan”! This wretched DPSU like its kindred Mazgaon Dockyard, Avadi Heavy Vehicles, etc., guzzles money and survives only because the Department of Defence Production in the Defence Ministry thinks it is its remit to keep these DPSUs afloat. In all the years since their inception thay have not done anything remotely innovative by way of technology. Unless you count screwdrivering weapons platforms from knocked down kits innovation!

The more obvious solution would have been to have DRDO transfer the Tejas source codes, etc to L&T and Godrej Aerospace for them to set up additional Tejas production lines of their own, as I have been advocating in these posts, thereby augmenting the HAL production rate of 16 aircraft per year. With the second HAL assembly line that rate would go up to 32 aircraft annually. But the IAF requirement already contracted for is 180 Tejas 1A and Mk2 aircraft. At a 32 aircraft production clip, it will take HAL 6 some years — and that is a theoretical minimum. In reality, HAL delivered just TWO this past year because, well, of GE’s delay in sending the F404 engines! Precisely the reason why the Defence ministry should still choose the indigenous KDE option.

Additional L&T and Godrej production lines for Tejas and for the 73kN KDE power plant would have made the Tejas enterprise entirely independent of foreign engines and potentially a huge revenue generator if these private firms were also tasked,simultaneously, to sell Tejas abroad, find an international market for it. And this is the option NOT selected by the Defence Ministry.

The Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh at a media event last week explained why the IAF and the other two services bank on imported hardware. “There is always a tradeoff between what you can buy of the shelf and what you develop over time in terms of what the forces need immediately. We have trid to provide them”, he said, ” the flexibility through the emergency procuremenrt process….There is a tradeoff in the short term, but in the long run, the intent is to go fully indigenous in all of these capabilities.”

This immediate need-indigenous capability tradeoff as I pointed out in my 2015 book Why India is not a great power (yet), is not convincing, and is actually the reason why India remains an arms dependency and will continue to do so into the future. This is because a small number of Rafale aircraft, say, bought to meet urgent needs becomes the wedge in the door for the IAF to get more of the same foreign aircraft at the expense of the indigenous, also 4.5 generation Tejas aircraft. The Tejas programme was put through the meat grinder to realise a perfect aircraft without kinks, in the hope that it would simply die! The funding for the imports as a consequence is assured, not so for the home grown item which is made to jump through unending hoops. Does anybody care to remember that the Tejas was found unacceptable by the IAF because weapons had not been integrated into it, delaying its induction by 4-5 years. BUT, the IAF was happy to fly the Mirage 2000 without any weapons for several years before they were outfiited with them! Because IAF had not contracted for the weapons! Or, did but did not get them with the platforms as contracted.

And, does anybody ask about the deficiences of the imported plane? So, how did Rafale fare in Sindoor, pray? The Spectra electronic warfare suite at the heart of this supposedly advanced high-tech combat aircraft and constituting — by rule of thumb — some 20% of the price of the plane, proved a DUD. Spectra is described by Wikipedia as a system incorporating “radar warning, laser warning, and missile appoach warning for threat detection plus a phased array radar jammer and a decoy dispenser for threat countering”. OK. So, what happened? None of these do-dahs worked! Its radars and sensors could not pick up the Pakistani Saab 2000 Eriye Airborne Warning and Control System surveilling the Indian skies and specifically tracking the Rafale once it came into its view as target of interest. And the Spectra had even less clue about the Pakistan Air Force JC-10 loitering in passive mode before closing in for weapon release, leave alone about the PL15E air-to-air missile it fired, resulting in the targeted Rafale getting downed in Aklia village outside Bhatinda. And, the country is supposed to pay tens of billions of Euros for 114 more such lemons?!!!

In the IAF and the Indian Navy brass, the French defence industry has found a bunch of connivers who are making a perennial sucker out of India. (On the navy and 75i, another time.) Then again, with Mirage-Rafale-Scorpene buys requiring repeated trips to Paris and its allurements catered for as part of the offsets, no one will object to buying these pieces of hardware, especially as the Indian government is complicit. It behaves as if it has all the money in the world to waste, except when it comes letting the Indian private sector in, when every paisa gets counted. The fear among many military personnel and defence civilians is that this easy channel of corruption — Paris trips being only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, would be eliminated.

India paid some Rs 59,000 crores for 36 Rafales, or Rs 1,640 cr per aircraft in 2015, and Rs 62,000 crores for 26 Rafale Marine, or Rs 2,385 cr for each aircraft to adorn an Indian deck, for a total of Rupees one lakh twenty-one thousand crores, so far for 62 aircraft. Notice the inverse relationship between the cost of aircraft and their price. How much will the 114 more Rafales cost? Who knows! Dassault can quote any damned price they want, and the supplicant Indian government will pay it, with dozens of guaranteed trips to, oh yes, Paris by the Price Negotiation Committee! Another among the routine Third World country scams that go unnoticed! That’s the price the country pays for NOT DESIGNING and making its own weapons systems, even when it is perfectly capable of doing so, if only Modi and Rajnath Singh looked beyond the DPSUs.

The fact, specifically, is that the IAF is a foreign aircraft junkie and has been since its birth, doing whatever it can to get its next fix of non-performing junk of flying metal. The reason this is allowed is that the Defence Ministry and PMO act like indulgent parents of a dope addict — who, they think, can do no wrong. Except in real life, the defence ministry-PMO are bereft of domain expertise and very nearly oblivious to developments in warfare generally, and air warfare in particular, and choose to leave it to the “professionals” to do right by the country. But all the Vayu Bhavan brass seem to do is make self-serving decisions.

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Modi’s effusive response to Trump sets India up for more humiliation

Posted on September 8, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Hello, did you miss me?]

Photographs often reveal the subsurface reality as nothing else does. Just call up the trove of Modi-Trump pics on the net and what you see in most of them is Modi fawning over Trump, looking up endearingly at him, just too eager to please. The one with a bemused Melania (look at her eye, above) looking on as Modi embraces the US President ardently even as the latter reciprocates stiffly, is comical.

It suggests just how much Modi wants Trump to like him, and wants him to muster the intimacy the PM himself feels for the American — why? is not clear. It also suggests that the Indian leader is stuck in time, in the heyday of the “Howdy, Modi!” phase of their personal relations, but that Trump has moved on. As has US policy from centering on India to pivoting on the extended region. It is the reason why the 38-year old, Russian-speaking Sergio Gor, in-charge of personnel at the White House is the ambassador-designate not just to India but to the entire region, including presumably Pakistan and other South Asian states and Central Asia. Gor’s nomination can be a good thing for India, because the US will, per strategic logic, need an anchor for its regional policy and it cannot be any other country than India. This fact can be used by New Delhi to shape Gor’s mindset, Trump’s attitude, and the US policy. The more likely thing to happen is Gor tending the Kurilla way, and India being in the outhouse.

General Michael Kurilla is the recently retired chief of the US Central Command, who described Pakistan as a “phenomenal partner” in fighting terrorism, and couldn’t quite contain himself when praising the Pakistan army and its chief! Gor can then be expected to look upon Pakistan as the less difficult, more pliable, client state led by Field Marshal Asim Munir who, reportedly, has parked his wife and children in America where they have taken up US citizenship. With the Trump Family’s crypto and mining businesses dictating US policy, and Munir promising implicitly to add hugely to the US President’s personal wealth while, no doubt also enhancing his own family’s fortunes, this is the direction the US will be heading in.

Being on the outs with America is, in any case, what India should prudently prepare for. Instead, the Modi regime seems inclined to cling to the hope that treating Trump like some old style oriental potentate would prompt him to shower favours on India. On Friday (Sept 5), Trump said he’ll “always be friends with Modi”. When queried if he was ready to reset relations, he replied with a non-sequiter — “India and the United States have a special relationship”, adding that “There’s nothing to worry about. We just have moments on occasion.” And then he kvetched again about India buying oil from Russia and about his 50% tariffs to punish the country. The Indian prime minister reacted instantly and in an embarrasingly effusive manner: “Deeply appreciate and fully reciprocate President Trump’s sentiments and positive assessment of our ties. India and the US have a very positive and forward looking Comprehensive and Global Strategic Partnership”. This, as a Sunday newspaper felt constrained to point out, was only a day after Trump had posted on social media that the US had “lost” India to “deepest, darkest” China! And his prime attack dog, the commerce minister Edward Lutnick, had confidently predicted India would “say sorry” and return to finalise a free trade agreement! There was no reminding Trump by Modi in his response that the Indian government acts and will do so always on the basis of the country’s national interest, not on someone else’s say-so, that India is energy deficient and will continue to buy oil and gas from the cheapest source, and that Russia is an old friend and will remain so. This Modi and his regime did not do and, therefore, would Trump be wrong in assuming he can kick Modi and his government around every time he initiates these “moments”, and can compel them to do his bidding without disrupting or harming Indo-US ties?

Former Indian ambassadors to the US contacted by the media for their reactions uniformly said reponding “politely” to Trump was the right thing to do. No one said that making up with America is fine, but Washington ought to be put on notice if not by Modi than by Jaishankar, that India is not a Munir-ruled Pakistan to be trifled with. Nor did any amongst them criticise the external affairs minister for instead stressing the warmth in Modi’s personal relations with Trump! It appears there are no costs, no consequences for Trump treating India with disdain and its leader with contempt. National self-respect must mean something. If it doesn’t it must say something about us, and how much we lack by way of self-esteem.

Recall that Zhouenlai’s proffered hand was ignored by John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, in the 1950s. The Chinese state never forgot that insult and no Chinese leader shook hands with Western leaders again until Nixon on his breakthrough trip in 1972. Aware of this incident and how it had rankled the Chinese Communist brass, Nixon walked the length of the red carpet at the airport with outstretched hands, and it was only after Nixon stood before him for a few seconds still with his hand out did the great Mandarin deign to shake it. That’s how nations win respect, and not when leaders snivel around for attention. China is a nation with a long memory. India is without one no matter how much hurt and humiliation is heaped on it. This is a historical fact.

Which way America tilts wouldn’t really matter all that much if Indians and their government had a sense of themselves and of the country’s geostrategic and economic importance in the world, and did not approach the US, or anyone else, as a supplicant. The Italian film maker, Pier Paolo Passolini, visiting in the 1950s called India “a nation of beggars”. The indigent still clog our cities, and Indian politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats have their metaphorical hand out. So, what has changed?

There may, however, be a general awakening, including wthin the government and the community of retired babus and the like, specifically to the danger Trump and the US pose India, Reflecting the unease. Arvind Virmani, a former chief economic adviser wrote on social media “I am …gradually coming around to the view, that a large fraction of US elites prefer an India which is weak & subservient to the US and/or China over a strong India. The puzzle is why?”

WHY? Because as I have been at pains to emphasise over the last 35-odd years, that the US, like all big powers, is unscrupulous in pursuing its interests, but it is more venomous than others. India meanwhile has been busy trying to act the vishwa this, vishwa that, and to be a “responsible state”, and has ended up mostly hurting itself. Soft power, the government thinks, is all that India need have. What hard power and military muscle the country prides itself on couldn’t withstand the slightest pressure from Trump during Sindoor. The Modi regime seemed as eager as the Munir Gang on the other side to end that farce of a “war”. There are no points awarded, no gains registered, in international relations for restraint. And no national interest is served by restraint. It is always the narrowly defined national interest that has to be realised at all cost and by any means, and in extremis. There’s just too much of the supposedly elevated thinking the Indian government seems afflicted by. It has time and again been conned into believing that what’s good for America/the West is good for India, into supporting idiotic causes like nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, into asserting that shared democratic values, etc. matter. They don’t.

Have long maintained that because India and the Indian government have shown they are completely bereft of any strategic sense, the country’s interests would be better served if MEA and Defence Ministry merely aped Beijing and did what the Chinese do, and how they do it. The trouble is we can’t even do that. China proliferated nuclear missiles to Pakistan without a second thought. But merely mentioning a strictly reciprocal gesture of transferring nuclear missiles to states on China’s border to equalise the strategic situation, has our netas and babus breaking into cold sweat. Doing anything that Washington or Beijing frowns upon is likewise No Go. It seems there is nothing that India does as well as playing the victim. We also refuse to learn lessons from our own experiences, leave alone from others’.

What should the Indian government’s response have been to Trump’s attempt to reconnect?

The reaction ought to have been standoffish, with only the MEA spokesman saying something to the effect that “The Indian government notes President Trump’s interest in repairing relations with India, but trust cannot be easily restored. The US government could make a start by unconditionally removing the unfair and unjustified tariffs imposed on Indian exports.” That’s it. Nothing more! It would have set Trump thinking that India is harder to deal with than he thought. With Modi nor Jaishankar mentioning tariffs, the White House is free to believe the Indian government is fine with it!

It could put some teeth into this stance moreover by, for instance, holding all major capital acquisition/military procurement deals on hold. And doing the same to the free trade agreement neotiations. And to ensure India did not again step into any trap set by Trump’s whimsy-as-US-policy, the government should actively facilitate Indian exporters’ finding alternate markets for their goods, and to conspicuously ramp up economic and other relations with Russia, EU, China, and BRICS, and military cooperation with Australia and Japan — US allies that have about had it with Trump’s tariffs and unpredictable policies, and displayed it with more anger than New Delhi has shown. Especially now that the Pentagon has made public its intention to concentrate US resources on securing the homeland and the Western hemisphere leaving Asia, presumably, to China to lord over. This is G2 in the making I have been warning about. It is precisely the incentive needed for Asian states to cooperate, collaborate and mobilise to strategically tie down China — an evolving milieu New Delhi appears unmindful of. And for India to join Israel and Japan to develop advanced technology, freed from the oppressive American pressure and concerns.

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Geopolitics-geostrategics post-Sindoor, after Trump-tariff rift

Posted on September 7, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

This CHAKRA podcast “Why Trump Turned on India & Why It Backfired: The Sandeep Unnithan Show” was recorded on Aug 29, 2025 with Sandeep Unnithan.

It was an hour long recording trimmed to fit a half-hour slot!

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Modi showed spunk and spine, now time to bolster India’s leverage and really reform

Posted on September 1, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Making a point — Modi with Putin & Xi in Tianjin]

Narendra Modi and Donald Trump are hewn from the same narcissistic-autocratic Alpha leader cloth. And their clash may be pictured as between two tough mountain goats in a hard head-butting bout, neither backing down, and each trying to push the other over the cliff.

Trump was being Trump when, his hopes of the Nobel Peace Prize dashed by Modi’s refusal to support the nonsense about the US President’s role in ending Op Sindoor, he raked the Indian PM over the coals. He obviously expected that imposing 50% tariffs on India would lead to a chastised Modi folding, a’la Zelensky, and suing for peace. And, having shown up the Indian leader as his vassal, he’d then respond by magnanimously announcing a reduction of tariffs to the 25% level to Modi’s great relief! That didn’t work. Next, he had Peter Navarro, his Trade representative whom fellow economists call “stupid” and worse, try and exert pressure on New Delhi by ramping up the rhetoric about Ukraine being “Modi’s war” and India a “laundromat” for Russia’s ill-gotten monies. That didn’t work either, leaving the US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who had berated India for buying Russian oil, to tone down the invective by telling Fox News that “at the end of the day we will come together.” Nope, that isn’t happening!

Instead, the next thing that actually happened was India walked out of the Free Trade Agreement negotiations (as Navarro tells it), and Modi betook himself to Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement summit to talk things over with Putin and Xi Jinping. But not before first flying into Tokyo, there to sign a ramped up defence cooperation agreement with Japan, and publicly to support Japanese claims on the Senkaku Islands in the East Sea disputed with China — an “in your face” move that must have rocked Xi and his team back on their heels. Because they surely expected a cowed down Modi to be more malleable. So, for the first time in his tenure as prime minister — and for the first time, in fact, since whenever, that an Indian leader showed spunk and spine. That he did so before entering the lair of the dragon, is particulary commendable.

One so wishes Trump had mistreated Modi in this manner in his first term, just so the country was spared the ensuing spectacle of the leader of a proud country acting like a servile and obsequious nobody in the court of Trump. Still, now with Modi humiliated he reacted as he should have done all along — standing his ground, and telling Trump and Xi Jinping where to get off!

The most interesting thing to happen in Tianjin, incidentally, was outside the conference hall. Modi and Putin, it is said, spent a whole hour together inside the latter’s posh armoured vehicle, before reaching the summit site. Whatever they talked about, they seemed at the end of their closed interaction inside Putin’s car — no doubt swept clean of Chinese listening devices, and not anywhere outside where their conversation may have been picked up — to have a spring in their step as they walked in seperately to be greeted by Xi. Bet, it wasn’t just niceties they exchanged!

It is good to see the Indian PM with a chip on his shoulder for being treated shabbily, and publicly at that, by the US President. I had said in my 2018 book ‘Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition’ that Modi’s “creeper vine foreign policy” of wrapping itself around America, would NOT turn out well for India. It turned out even less well for Modi, personally, especially when he had invested so much political capital in building Trump up as his “good friend” and India’s relationship with America, as special — an enterprise hurrahed along by retired diplomats, generals, JNU academics, and lay media commentators. All these people, not surprisingly, beseeched Modi in op-eds in the wake of his breakup with Trump, to grin and bear the personal hurt, and for India to absorb the tariff pain, and generally to behave like a nation of Gungadins!

Shame! Shame!

What is galling is why the government never got its story right, off the gate, on the Russian oil at the centre of this brouhaha. At the Bratislava Forum early in the year, foreign minister S Jaishankar said that India was buying oil from Russia at discounted rates at Washington’s behest. More recently, petroleum minister Hardip Puri told BBC that India’s decision to buy Russian energy was for purely commercial reasons — it was available cheap. So, which is it, because it matters? Apparently, Jaishankar was being more candid. But he also revealed that New Delhi was happy doing first Biden’s and later Trump’s bidding, and buying oil just because at that time the international oil price stability served the interests of the US and European states who needed diesel and other refined oil products that they previously secured from Russia directly. In fact, so convoluted is the energy politics that the diesel produced by the Reliance refinery in Jamnagar from processed Russian crude actually makes up some 15% of the Ukrainian requirement of diesel! So, would India not be hurting Kyiv’s war effort by stopping Russian oil purchases?

To return to Tianjin, as if to cement the fracture in relations with the US, Modi in his formal speech at the summit, said: “India and Russia have a special and privileged partnership. In the most difficult and testing times, India and Russia have always stood by each other,” and added that India “eagerly” awaits Putin’s visit later in the year. With respect to China, Modi was straightforward. “Our cooperation is linked to the interests of 2.8 billion people of our two countries”, he asserted. “This will also pave the way for the welfare of all humanity. We are committed to advancing our relations based on mutual trust, respect, and sensitivity.” Not to be outdone in sentiment, Xi referred to the world “undergoing rapid transformations and international instability. China and India are the two major Eastern powers and the most populous countries in the world…We uphold”, he declared, “strong commitment: advancing the unity and revival of developing countries and promoting human progress are important strategies. As good friends and partners who support each other, integrating and uniting should be the right path for China and India.”

Under assault from Trump, it indicates a certain solidifying of the RIC (Russia-India-China) grouping, which effect will spill over in the economic realm into a strengthened BRICS, with Brazil, like India, smashed with 50% tariffs. Brazil has, remained defiant, with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ensuring that his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, charged with treason, whom Trump tried to save by threatening tariffs, will be tried in court. Indeed, Lula is fortifying the military guard around Bolsonaro lest he try and escape, perhaps, with American (CIA) help.

What Trump has unwittingly achieved is solidarity of all the major non-NATO countries that together will be too much for a receding power like America or even the US+NATO to handle.

What Modi has to now ensure is that India does not lose the leverage it has gained with the US and China. He will have to resist the pleadings from the corporate world and the internal leanings of the MEA under Jaishankar, to reach an understanding with Trump. The US President finds himself up a creek and there’s no reason to rescue him by having the Indian governement climb down from its principled position.

There’s the deal for 113 GE 414 jet engines, for starters. Modi can drive a hard bargain by demanding that GE hand over source codes to India — a demand that should be made with the French firm, Dassault Avions, as well for the source codes for the ridiculously expensive 4.5 generation Rafale and Rafale-Marine aircraft, on the pain of rescinding the deals for them. It is the French, we must remember, who not too long ago admonished Thyssen-Krupp for promising to furnish India with the source codes for the HDW 214 diesel submarine with Air Independent Propulsion for the Indian navy’s Project 75i. (More on these deals, hopefully, in a future post.)

With regard to the US and China, moreover, India has to conduct its foreign policy nonlinearly — something China and America have always done expertly with India. Thus, because US healthcare depends on generic drugs produced cheaply by Indian pharma companies, their import is exempt from Trump’s tariffs. Jewelry, leather goods, etc are not exactly great things for India to export and the fact that they are tariffed, well, what the heck they may be routed into the US market via third countries. The consumer goods, let Indian manufacturers find alternate markets in Africa and Latin America for them by producing them more cheaply than China does. Hey, that’s the marketplace logic. Swim or sink! The Modi government has also instantly to diplomatically stop opening H1B type visa doors for would be Indian techie immigrants to the US, West European states, and Australia that they prefer to go to. There are cultural resistance movements in all these countries against Indians in their midst. It reflects on the country that so many want to escape it.

RIC and BRICS are fine by way of balancing the US economically and politically. But China too has to be balanced, but militarily and here BRIS (Brazil-Russia-India-South Africa) and Modified or Mod Quad (India-Japan-Australia and the US replaced by a group of Southeast Asian countries) should be diligently pursued, and loose and informal securitised dyads and triads of, say, India-Japan-Australia, India-Japan-South Korea, India-Indonesia-Philippines, India-Vietnam-Philippines, etc — as I argue in my next book that I am currently finishing, will provide precisely the overlapping military protection for regional and sub-regional countries without the impedimenta of formal alliances, etc.

Shouldn’t Modi, at least now, after seeing India getting kicked with tariffs, and the closing of H1B visa channel and restrictions on entry of Indian students — because both he and Jaishankar have been going round over the years preaching “labour mobility” to advanced countries who are not listening anymore, do what he has long promised but not delivered — “Reform, Perform, Transform”? Or, is it forever to remain just a slogan?

With digitisation successfully implemented, has the Prime Minister ever wondered why the government portals dealing especially with licenses are always not working? Because this is how the babus make money? And why are the babus still permitted discretionary power — a means of generating bribes? And why are there so many licenses to open and conduct business, any way? And why are so many paper documents needed in the digital age for bureaucratic oversight? Where, in fact, is the “ease of doing business” that the government keeps boasting about?

And what happened, PMji, to getting the government out of the business of business? Why not, in this respect, start by privatising the defence public sector units? You corporatised them, good. Now let them go to the market for capitalisation, sell shares, as L&T, Mahindra Godrej Aerospace, et al, do, and have them compete for military contracts instead of, as happens now, the Department of Defence Production in the Defence Ministry, in sweet heart manner, channeling contracts to the hopeless and resources- wasting HAL, Mazgaon Dockyard, etc.

Please, Modiji, pay attention to these aspects of administration. Artificial Intelligence can remove the need for most of these armies of peons, clerks, section officers clogging up the system. Let AI take over these roles, allowing you to drastically prune the central government — which would lead, in its train, to the shrinking of state and local governments.

But efficient and effective AI requires that the mountains of laws, rules, regulations, to simply be discarded whole — these are the remnants of the British Raj. Time they were given the heave ho. And with the government bringing in Constitutional Amendments left and right, why not do the country and its people the ultimate service of removing Article 311 in the Constitution that provides lifetime security of employment to government employees, chaprassi on up, as a means of sprucing up the government?When public servants know that their continued employment depends on their effectiveness and efficiency in office, they will perform and, voila!, the Indian society will be transformed!! No Indian Prime Minister then would have to go on bended knees to foreign leaders to offtake employable youth to avoid an explosive social powder keg from developing at home.

These reforms and such steps are what will push India into the great power category by 2047. Looking to the US, China or anyone else for help and assistance which, in any case, will be unavailable, is not going to get India there.

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Hard knocks for Modi

Posted on August 9, 2025 by Bharat Karnad

[Modi and Trump in Feb 2025]

People ask if I feel vindicated with Trump and the US turning on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India, and heaping insult on humiliation with a 50% tariff that’s the highest imposed on any country. There’s something to be said after all about the satisfaction with saying “I told you so!” But I have been saying so for decades, and satisfaction wears off quickly to be replaced by frustration at the amateurs in Delhi trying to play in the realpolitik major league and being nowhere up to scratch.

The desperate diplomatic lunges by NSA Ajit Doval towards Moscow is to be followed soon by the country’s leading pusher of good relations with America at any cost — even India’s sovereignty — S Jaishankar, our esteemed external affairs minister (EAM).

(Incidentally, IFS officers in MEA, I am told, are surprised and appalled by the extent to which Jaishankar is pushing the “give in to Trump”, “buy peace with Trump” lines, and by how much he is willing to compromise the national interest.)

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping sits pretty in Zhongnanhai watching, as is every Asian government and regime, India getting kicked around by Trump with a mewling response from New Delhi. This even as China is the biggest importer/buyer of Russian oil and gas via direct pipelines to the energy sources in Siberia and suffers no proportionate tariffs because, well, Beijing can deny exports to the US of rare earths magnets critical to many US weapons systems. So we have, as someone noted, the deliciously surreal scenario of a country withholding supply of something to another country needing it to fight the supplier state! But Xi is a cool hand at this game. And must be licking his chops awaiting Modi’s state visit — the first in 7 years when he too can turn the tourniquet, seek a modus vivendi on the LAC on Chinese terms, which, in any case, the PLA has snatched on the ground.

Or, for that matter, what do you think Putin’s treatment of Jaishankar would be when he visits Moscow to once again seek support now that Trumpian America has kicked India to the curb? And why he’d be met with a mix of barely concealed contempt, condescension and not a little schadenfreude, even as Putin too would happily turn the screw, but more silkily. Russian oil might become dearer for a start!

Modi’s response to Trump’s relentless attacks is to say he is prepared to “pay a heavy price. [And] India is prepared to pay a heavy price.” Brave words and fine, but a predictable and nearly useless response other than as a warning to the Indian people to tighten their collective belt for the leaner times ahead. Because, all it will do is to motivate Trump and to an equal degree Xi, and even Putin/Peskov/Lavrov in Moscow to see just how far the US can push India around, or to put it differently, what Modi’s breaking point is, if there’s a breaking point.

But the question is how did Modi get India into this position? Obviously because, advised and prodded by Jaishankar, he gave every indication that he’d walk the extra mile in placating and pacifying Trump, and preparing to move all the country’s eggs into America’s basket, leaving the country overly vulnerable. Except Trump understands how he’s relatively placed with the other leaders. With Putin and Xi, he knows he can’t do other than play it straight. Modi, he realises is a clinger, with a policy of clinging to any passing coattail, and can be dealt with abruptly and with a dismissive attitude.

Modi is not a Luiz Lula da Silva of Brazil nor a Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a Berkeley PhD in energy management and hence clearly an intellectual overmatch for Trump. Lula shot down Trump with his gringo-jibe, and Sheinbaum has been, as the online political magazine, Politico, described her, “icy cool”, refusing to rise to his bait, but taking actions beneficial to both countries. Like hammering the drug cartels. Trump therefore finds nobody to bully except Modi. And because he finds Modi cowed, the Indian PM can expect yet more bullying, and still more after that next bout, until Modi stands up and and says no more!

But, where and who can Modi turn to now — Kremlin? Dusting off India’s attribute as a geostrategic leverage against both the US and China is the best bet. But, perhaps, on stiffer terms. And Modi will take himself to Beijing and deal with Xi from a much weaker position. He may not get kicked in the face as he bends his knee, as he was by Trump, but he won’t come away with consideration either.

Things however have got to such a pass, it has now become personal. Here Modi is up a creek. He has always acted the inferior with Trump — and that’s the way the latter likes it. The US President has seen all Europe and the Asian Far East Asian allies accept his economic diktats. And everybody’s on board to humour his conceit as a peacemaker and win the Nobel Peace Prize to match the one awarded to President Barack Obama in 2009 for doing nothing more strenuous by way of peacemaking than delivering a speech in Prague. Quite literally! So why not double down — and this is a piece of advice to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee — on the joke they authored: Hand the damn thing to Trump keen on besting Obama at every thing, and let’s be done with it!

Azerbaijan and Armenia appreciate the joke only too well as their leaders have accepted Trump’s invitation to sign a peace accord in the White House to buttress its present occupant’s supposed peacemaking reputation! The chances are that Trump does not know where either of these countries is, or what peace it is which he has allegedly mediated and over what (Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian Christian enclave that’s been virtually ethnically cleansed of Armenians in the wake of the war between them in 2020). But these are details, and unimportant! It is the peacemaker role he was robbed off by the Indian government refuting his involvement in Op Sindoor which, in Trump’s imagination, he had ratcheted all the way up to a near nuclear exchange!! One can see how compelling that narrative might have been to the Nobel Committee in Stockholm had it an iota of truth in it, which the Indian government, spoiling it for Trump, said there wasn’t. General Asim Munir, quick to spot an opportunity to massage Trump’s ego, had Islamabad write an official note thanking the US President for his fictional “peace-making” intervention, and won Trump’s confidence. As easy as that! And then followed Trump’s venomous actions against India, ensuring some four decades of painstaking diplomacy, of building up India-US relations, of getting India over the hump of its deep down and well merited distrust of America, went up in smoke.

The upside is Modi may be cured of his unrequited love for Trump and America and, if the PM has any sense, he may care to put Jaishankar out to pasture as well, in the main because he is associated principally with fleshing out the US tilt in Indian policy that has proven to be such a monstrous disaster. Because, as long as he is still pulling the strings in the MEA, there will be no movement toward equilibrating the Indian foreign policy between Asia-minus China, Russia, EU and the US with BRICS, the security-related BRIS (BRICS minus China) to militarily balance China without America that I proposed (in my 2018 book — Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition), and with the same objective in mind, a Modified Quadrilateral (India, Japan and Australia) with the US in this group replaced by a bunch of Southeast Asian nations — so that a loose overarching security architecture does not have to depend on an unreliable and untrustworthy America. (An analog of this seems to be what President Emanuel Macron of France has in mind for an exclusively European defence system.)

Alternative security arrangements, more organic to Asia, need to be conceived and considered by the Indian government and the military, because to continue to bank on any external power for strategic security against China is to set India up for more surprise and humiliation in the future of the kind it is suffering at Trump’s and America’s hands.

Ultimately, it is a matter of national self-respect and goes beyond Modi or any other Indian leader of the day. Modi may be willing to stomach Trump’s obloquy; but the nation cannot bear to be so deliberately dishonoured.

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