Blindsided by Trump, Modi is learning hard lessons about India's place in the new world order | Mukul Kesavan

When Donald Trump won his second term, India’s ruling elite must have been quietly pleased. Prime minister Narendra Modi’s performative courting of King Donald, both in and out of office, suggested a special chemistry between these two titans of the hard right. As Trump set about remaking global trade and geopolitics by weaponising tariffs, India got into trade negotiations with the US early. New Delhi accepted that negotiations would be difficult, given its red lines on agricultural and dairy products. Yet it was optimistic about getting a deal commensurate with India’s economic heft – and strategic value to the US as a counterweight to China. Instead, Trump first slapped India, in April, with a 25% tariff that in itself exceeded the rate levied on most US allies. This has now doubled to 50%, as punishment for India for buying, refining and exporting Russian oil during that country’s war on Ukraine. This tariff rate will make all nonexempt Indian exports to the US uncompetitive. Modi’s much-touted special relationship with Trump now looks risible. And it wasn’t just the tariffs. India’s short war with Pakistan after the Pahalgam terrorist atrocity in April saw Trump, and his vice-president JD Vance, treat India and Pakistan as squabbling south Asian neighbours that had to be brought to order by US intervention. Trump’s insistence that his telephoned threats had forced India and Pakistan to stop fighting seemed to bracket India and Pakistan as unruly nuisances, a humiliating equivalence that India felt duty-bound to repudiate. It has since been suggested that the real trigger for the 50% tariff was India denying Trump, desperate for a Nobel peace prize, credit for peacemaking. Trump made it clear that this was a punishment beating. He dismissed India as a “dead economy” while his chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, accused India of war profiteering by buying discounted Russian oil. He even described the Ukrainian conflict as “Modi’s war”. This mortifying breakdown of relations has discredited Modi’s decade-long effort to play the well-connected world statesman. The energetic hugging and over-the-top bonhomie that characterised his photo ops with world leaders seem gauche in retrospect. But it would be a mistake to think of this turn in Indo-US relations purely in terms of a powerful individuals. Large countries such as India have geopolitical moorings that aren’t easily loosened. Non-alignment – India’s cold-war-era positioning as neither capitalist nor communist – isn’t a fashionable term in Modi’s India because of its Nehruvian antecedents, but his foreign policy has tried to maintain India’s freedom of action in a multipolar world. Non-alignment might now fly under the flag of “strategic autonomy” but its aim is not dissimilar. India’s ability to buy Russian oil, refine it and re-export it to Europe with the tacit blessing of the Biden administration was, until recently, seen as an example of this bloc-straddling suppleness. What changed was that over the past quarter of a century, India’s political class began to see the US as the country’s natural partner. It was the main destination of India’s exports and also the aspirational destination for the children of its ruling elite. Since the time of Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, who signed the Indo-US nuclear deal, India has tilted towards Washington. The Quad, a grouping of four countries – Japan, Australia, the US and India – designed to foil China’s designs in the Indo-Pacific, was widely read as a sign of this westward tilt. This tilt has led to a curious unbalancing of India’s foreign policy. Its feet firmly planted in strategic autonomy, India has leaned towards the US to get close and personal, via alliances that aren’t quite alliances, and vibes that aren’t matched by substance. India’s policymakers under Modi assumed that India’s aggregate economic heft and its growth rate had elevated it to the world’s top table. The fact is, India isn’t rich enough or white enough or English-speaking enough to be a charter member of either the west or the anglophone world. Modi’s mandarins forgot that – outside the charmed circle of the west – the US doesn’t have allies, it has clients. Trump’s decision to further raise tariffs on India out of resentment was a reminder that US presidents have often seen India as either a supplicant or a nuisance or both. Pundits argue that Trump is a maverick, that the Indo-US relationship is too important both economically and geopolitically for this froideur to last. It’s much more likely that Trump is ahead of the curve, that he is saying out loud what other western leaders are still too constrained by liberal convention to utter. Western benevolence has always been predicated on western hegemony. Once the climate crisis and China’s rise made it clear that the west’s supremacy wasn’t future-proofed; once the promise of steady economic growth, the modern measure of secular progress, became unredeemable, western centrists began to secede from the world order they had created in their pomp. Gaza is the sum of this secession. The WTO, overseas aid, due process for asylum seekers, international humanitarian law, the UN system – the whole postwar order built by the west and led by the US – is being cast aside as rich countries circle their wagons against a needy, unruly world. This has led to the near-simultaneous rise of agenda-setting far-right parties in western countries. Trump-like and Trump-lite demagogues have become inevitable. Nigel Farage, Jordan Bardella, Alice Weidel, Viktor Orbán are living proof that Trump’s mix of nativism and protectionism is the reality that India and non-western countries more generally will have to contend with for the foreseeable future. (One of the revelations of Trump’s second term has been the willingness of European leaders to abase themselves to propitiate the US.) For all the liberal hand-wringing about Trump’s crudities, where he leads, the European political class will follow. Trump’s tariffs aren’t whims, they are portents. They are bricks in the wall that the west is building to fortify its compound. Modi, like Indian prime ministers before him, is learning that geography can’t be transcended, that non-alignment isn’t a choice – it is a necessity. India’s place in the world will often present it with grim, constrained choices. It can’t square up to the US, as China does, as an equal. Nor can it kowtow to Trump as the EU has, like a client looking for protection. India will continue to walk a tightrope, teetering this way then that, as it negotiates a hostile world under the watchful eyes of its vulnerable people. Mukul Kesavan is an Indian historian, novelist and political and social essayist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.