TWO deviously connected messages in a Donald Trump tweet targeted India and Russia simultaneously. To India, the threat sought to deter Narendra Modi from buying Russian oil with an implicit inducement for him to lean on the US for such help.
A subsequent tweet rejoiced in cultivating robust US ties with Pakistan, thereby rubbing more salt into India’s lacerating wound. To Russia, the threat was more dire and more troubling even though Indians are full of their own grief, which otherwise should be an occasion to pick up another more trustworthy date for a life together.
For the world’s self-proclaimed fourth largest economy, the numbers contradict the story of grief over Trump’s tariffs. The wounded stance is intended to mislead the public.
Figures from the US trade representative’s office indicate a more placid truth. The total India-US goods trade in 2024 was an estimated $129.2 billion. Of these, US goods exports to India were $41.8bn, up 3.4 per cent ($1.4bn) from 2023. US goods imports from India totalled $87.4bn in 2024, up 4.5pc ($3.7bn) from 2023.
The US goods trade deficit with India was $45.7bn in 2024, a 5.4pc increase ($2.4bn) over 2023. The main Indian exports were pharmaceuticals, gems and jewellery, textiles and apparel, and organic chemicals. The brouhaha over Trump’s scarecrow tariffs is a deliberately exaggerated reaction. And here’s why.
In November 2020, a few months after returning to power for a second term, the Modi government took a precipitous decision for India against joining the China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.
Many of China’s regular rivals joined, including Japan and Vietnam, but not India.
Modi’s ill-advised decision against the RCEP led to missed opportunities for economic growth as well as strategic influence in the Indo-Pacific region. Specifically, analysts say, India lost out on increased market access, investment opportunities and a stronger role in regional supply chains. Reports from the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated India could have experienced gains in income and GDP by joining RCEP, potentially around $60bn annually. Reasons for Modi’s decision appear to have been less than sincere.
Indian officials were cited as saying RCEP could expose Indian industries to increased competition from cheaper imports, potentially impacting domestic manufacturing and employment. If at all that was the case, which seems unlikely, what shall we suppose Trump is trying to do — boost Indian manufacturing and employment?
And if fear of exposure to competition was indeed a factor, what does India think it is doing in BRICS, whose presidency it assumes next year, when it plays host to a crucial summit? BRICS is an increasingly powerful economic group, and a robust challenger to America’s dollar hegemony. Being in BRICS and not joining RCEP would not get Modi’s advisers admission to the mohalla kindergarten.
The explanation for the decision more likely lies in India’s malleable American lobby that has collared the nation’s destiny since the fall of the USSR. A malleable object is something stubborn, which can endure hammer blows and only change its shape or form but never break. India’s American lobby is similarly a supplicant of unwavering faith in its transatlantic deity, come rain or shine. It sees the deity within as the source of its own prosperity and class survival.
The lobby’s rock-solid loyalty to the US makes it immune to the insults and body blows President Trump has begun to fling at it. The deity they swear by and grovel before cannot let them down, the lobby says. The supplicants witnessed with silent self-recrimination, for example, the chains and the fetters put on fellow Indians by the mindlessly vicious deity.
The brouhaha over Trump’s scarecrow tariffs is a deliberately exaggerated reaction.
Several were put on military planes with orders to land away from prying cameras in Delhi. As the horrific scenes played out, the lobby remained unfazed. “It is the rule of the temple, after all. What can we do?” chimed a voluble worshipper who has offspring in America singing paeans to the deity.
Recently, it began to speak in a human voice from the billowing smoke and chaos of Operation Sindoor and Bunyan Marsoos. It claimed it had pressed both sides and the war stopped. The American lobby was in a bind. The deity claimed it had won the peacemaker’s trophy, which would be a help but not a requirement for the Nobel.
Indian leaders said they had enforced the ceasefire, not the deity. But they couldn’t explain why they had agreed to a ceasefire if they were winning. Prime Minister Modi can’t accept Trump’s version of the ceasefire — at least not before the elections in Bihar.
So, India has been dealt a poor hand by Trump. It deserves a fairer deal. BRICS and RCEP are all about that, but the American lobby stands in the way. There is also a business calculation. Many stand to erode their overt or covert assets if major economies migrate away from the dollar.
Trump’s message to Moscow was even more threatening. Like the American lobby that links Trump’s rage to Modi’s bloated ego as the culprit to studiously avoid mention of BRICS as the real offender, the tiff with Russia is being played out as one about invectives between Trump and former president Dmitry Medvedev.
The West has been exploring a decapitating strike on Moscow for decades, which is what Trump reheated by sending thermonuclear-tipped Trident missiles aboard two submarines close to the Russian maritime border.
Unlike India, the Russian response was withering. It reminded Trump of the perils of the ‘dead hand’, a highly accurate Soviet-era system programmed to unleash thousands of nuclear missiles in the Russian arsenal against Western targets should there be a decapitating strike on Russian leadership by the US. Like Russia, India should have little to fear from Trump’s insane pyrotechnics. But the American lobby is working overtime to stall the much overdue foreign policy overhaul.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2025
