Depending on who you are reading, the 25% tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump on India, and the flurry of his petulant tweets, have not provoked the Indian government to respond. For once, there is benefit in the ponderous nature of Indian bureaucracy. A slanging match with Trump is beneath India and it would only encourage more petulant behaviour. If the world’s biggest democracy cannot show propriety, at least the world’s oldest needs to display dignity. This controversy has many layers which are worth unpacking.
First, to take America’s point, a re-adjustment of tariffs is not necessarily a bad thing, and it may even have been required. Overdependence on American largesse was never going to be sustainable in the long-run, and its national debt of $36 trillion is at dystopian levels. There is a case to be made for more equitable levels of trade. But the manner and tonality in which the Trump administration has gone about rolling out these tariffs, while at the same time wrecking the existing international trade system, will be remembered long after the Trump presidency ends. As far as economic damage is concerned, in the mid-to-long term, to the Indian economy, it is unlikely to be extremely significant.
Though some immediateterm pain is inevitable. It is important to note that Trump’s actions may well prove to be detrimental to his own constituency in America as prices of goods— especially things like pharmaceuticals and electronics—rise. In the end, the price of this tariff rise will be paid by the Indian consumer, especially since India’s exports to the US are less than 2% of its GDP. In comparison, Vietnam and Indonesia, at 20% and 19% tariff-levels, get 30% and 10% of their GDP from exports to the US. Contrary to popular belief, negotiations between the US and India are still on and the final tariff level will most probably be lower than 25%. But Trump has made it clear that the tariffs issued on India are not merely about trade balancing.
They are also about a sort of punishment for continuing to buy Russian oil and weapons. This is duplicitous at many levels. India’s energy needs to sustain a 1.5 billion-strong population cannot and should not be held hostage to the recurring conflicts of America and the West. Already India has moved away from key sources of energy like Iran and Venezuela upon American sanctions against those states. Russia, on the other hand, is not only an old and trusted friend of India, it also provides oil at rates that are highly beneficial to the Indian economy.
The most ironical and farcical point about this whole issue is that a majority of the refined Russian oil via India is often being bought by the European Union, America’s ally in the war in Ukraine, which castigates India for buying the crude from Russia. The hypocrisy is staggering. There are many things that India could do to respond. One of its leverages is the depth and extent of business that the so-called FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) companies do in India. Add to that the American companies building global capability centres (GCCs) in India taking advantage of its scale, and highly skilled labour. Around 60% of the GCCs in India come from American companies who benefit from India’s 1.5 million STEM graduates a year.
This is not a scale that can be matched anywhere else by American firms, and their voices in this negotiation are critical. It must be highlighted that India has already committed to buying more American oil but the US alone cannot serve the scale of India’s energy demands. India has been buying more American armaments, and an expansion of purchase is being discussed. From armed drones to anti-tank guided missiles, infantry combat vehicles, India is coordinating with America to buy more weapons. But even if the tariffs finally come down, there are issues that need resolving. In this late stage of order transition, America under Trump is attempting to revive its old unipolar hegemony—and if that’s not possible, as the Chinese are showing Trump at a weekto-week basis, then perhaps Trump is eager to settle for a sort of “G2” system, an uneasy but peaceable adjustment with China.
Will America ever commit serious troops on the ground to defend Taiwan? Very unlikely, no matter what the rhetoric. Would it do the same for South Korea or Japan? Probably not. Clearly, it has not committed bootson-the-ground in Ukraine, nor has its NATO allies. But while advising India to stab out longstanding ties with Russia, Trump is willing to keep allowing a long lease to Pakistan, a demonstrated global hotspot of terrorism, with a history of providing assistance to those who wish to attack America. Now Trump has announced that the US would help explore oil in restive Balochistan in Pakistan, where a decadeslong separatist movement has already tanked much of China’s plans to develop a key part of the Belt and Road Initiative. While it is unclear what oil can ever be meaningfully extracted in Pakistan, all this merely provides a cover to the Pakistani army, which has already converted the country into a sort of client state of China. From the Indian vantage point, it is perplexing to see why America would enter this quicksand, again.
But there is a growing feeling within India that while more than 25 years of work has been put in by enthusiasts of the India-US relationship in both countries, an inflection point has arrived. The question many ask is—could America (and the West) accept an India as the third pole of global power without trying to force it to become a sort of vassal state, always acquiescing to demands? Could India—in short—become a sort of Japan or Germany, compromise on its political and policy sovereignty to get all the benefits of being on the side of “rules-based liberal order”?
This kind of pressure has a long history. In the 1950s-60s, the US pressured India to align with the Western bloc. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru resisted, advocating non-alignment and helping found the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), despite repeated US requests for military and diplomatic alignment, especially in opposition to the Soviet Union and China. Today, India’s role in the expanding BRICS grouping annoys Trump as he sees it as a separate bloc which could “challenge the dollar domination”, even though India has explicitly said that it has no such intention. In 1961, when India liberated the state of Goa on its western coast from Portugal, the Kennedy administration condemned the action and cut foreign aid by 25%.
This was seen in India as an attempt to coerce Indian foreign policy and penalize an assertion of sovereignty. In 1971, during the Indo-Pakistani War that led to the creation of Bangladesh, the US under President Nixon supported Pakistan—despite reports of atrocities—and sent the 7th Fleet (including USS Enterprise) to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India. This move is widely regarded as an attempt to pressure India away from military intervention and strategic independence. In 1974, after India’s first nuclear test (PokhranI), the US led the drive to impose nuclear sanctions and technology embargoes on India, including cutting off nuclear fuel supplies to Indian reactors. This continued through later decades as well, with sanctions following any Indian efforts to assert an independent nuclear policy. Similar sanctions followed the 1998 nuclear tests—at this time, Indian policymaker Jaswant Singh even wrote a famous essay in Foreign Affairs describing the sanctions against India as “nuclear apartheid”.
Throughout the Cold War, the US not only maintained a close alliance with India’s adversary Pakistan (including military and economic support) but also led Western efforts (in bodies like the MTCR, NSG, and Australia Group) to deny India high-technology and strategic materials, hoping to curtail India’s independent capabilities. At various points, the US has tried to leverage aid, sanctions, or diplomatic pressure to influence Indian decisions regarding defence procurement (pressuring India not to buy arms from Russia), on participation in international forums and military exercises, relations with countries that the US considers adversaries, especially during periods of Cold War realignment or contemporary US-China rivalry.
Over the years, due to tireless efforts by champions of the relationship on both sides, great progress had been made, including the elevation of India-US ties to level of a “strategic partnership”. But as India demonstrates serious growing capabilities in armament manufacture, and export (Operation Sindoor was a stark demonstration of India’s missile, and drone, capabilities, for instance), and ability to build independent digital and financial architecture, the need to bring it under the alliance umbrella so that its choices could be predicted and even dictated has become more prominent on the Beltway.
The determined push to make India open its agriculture and dairy markets is part of this instinct. One of the more troubling aspects of this is to push into India “non-veg milk” from cattle that have been fed animal parts and cow blood—despite the known deep and resilient cultural taboo against this in India. Naturally, Indian policymakers understand the cultural (and political) repercussions of allowing something like this. Strong societies need the glue of shared taboos, and the crumbling of such anathemas is deeply unsettling and disruptive in traditional societies. All this makes Indians wary and determined not to relent. Perhaps Trump’s America does not realise this, but it will perhaps never have a government in India as inclined to strengthen and elaborate ties with the US as the Narendra Modi government, whose instinct for deal-making mirrors Trump’s own, and which sees America as a natural ally. But no Indian government has ever sacrificed its sovereignty and indeed no Indian government can survive by sacrificing sovereignty.
India has a clear and unambiguous view of its place in the world. This it has had even before Independence—and this vision has strong bipartisan acceptance and support. Trump cannot change this by throwing unparliamentary language at India on social media. India will always seek friendship with America on equal terms, remaining independentminded. It will never be a vassal state. From the time Raja Paurava told Alexander, “Treat me as you would treat a king” on the banks of the Indus, India has been saying this to the West. That it is patient. That the West will come and go, but eternal India will remain. For it is a civilisation. Trump’s America is merely a nation-state.
Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations at the O. P. Jindal Global University
