In 2019 there was a stadium in Houston, Texas, with more than 50,000 Indian Americans in the seats and two men at the front. One of them, Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, praised the other, Donald Trump, at length. “Every time [we meet], he has been the same: warm, friendly, accessible, energetic, and full of wit,” Modi said. He then reached for a slogan from his own winning campaigns and changed one word: “Abki baar, Trump sarkaar!” In Hindi: this time, a Trump government.
Trump was heading into a re-election fight. In effect, a foreign head of government was campaigning for him among the wealthiest diaspora in America.
Trump lost.
Seven years later he faces another vote, the midterms of November, which could cost him heavily in Congress and leave his legislative agenda crippled. This time nobody in New Delhi is chanting. As Yashraj Sharma reports for Al Jazeera, Indian officials have spent recent weeks criticising his administration more directly than ever before, and many analysts believe the Modi government may now prefer a Trump humbled by defeat.
The habit of friendship
New Delhi’s affection for Republican presidents goes back a long way. Under Ronald Reagan, as the Cold War wound down, India and the United States reset relations after decades of suspicion over India’s closeness to Moscow. Under George W. Bush, between 2006 and 2008, came the civil nuclear deal that opened global nuclear fuel and technology to India even though it had never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Military agreements followed, including one letting American ships and aircraft refuel and resupply at Indian bases. Democrats, as New Delhi saw it, were the ones who asked awkward questions about human rights.
Trump looked like the latest in that line. Modi called him “India’s best friend in the White House”.
The second Trump term ended that. Indian diplomacy has a settled custom of taking disputes with friendly governments behind closed doors. Months of friction have broken the custom. Last month in New York, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar described an administration that ignored India’s concerns about “terrorism”, grew warmer towards Pakistan, India’s archrival, and ran “self-centred” trade policies that fell hardest on the Global South, a shift rews covered at the time.
Countries should not be so self-centred that you’re in your own world and take your decision, and say, ‘Well, it was not my intention to make your life difficult’.
A list of grievances
The grievances are many: punitive tariffs and stalled trade talks; pressure to stop buying Russian oil; Trump’s repeated claim that he brokered the 2025 India-Pakistan ceasefire, which New Delhi rejects; Washington’s closer ties with Islamabad; higher fees for H-1B visas; and an immigration crackdown that has caught Indian workers. Early in the term, undocumented Indians were deported home in shackles, and the pictures caused outrage in India. On American social media, anti-Indian rhetoric is at an all-time high, and Trump’s MAGA movement has often accused Indians and Indian Americans, in racist terms, of “stealing” American jobs.
“The attacks on India and Indian Americans coming from this administration, and many of their allies in the media and on social media, have struck a nerve,” said Milan Vaishnav, who directs the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. India, he said, can live with real policy disagreements. He also said that “the Modi government has shown admirable restraint in its response”.
Tariffs hurt most. India was at one point among the countries facing Trump’s steepest rates. When the US Supreme Court struck down his sweeping tariffs in February, the administration quickly found other tools, including a new 10 percent global tariff. Last month Trump signed a law allowing tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries such as India that buy Russian oil, then paused it. He did not want energy prices rising before the midterms, and he wanted talks with Moscow over Ukraine to stay on track.
The trade talks have stalled. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on October 5 that the two sides had reached a “plateau beyond which giving or taking might be very difficult”, though she allowed that both might move “if there is room to operate from”.
Mumbai, not Delhi
Then came Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He visited Mumbai and skipped the capital. In an interview with The Indian Express, whose transcript the State Department published, he said, in Al Jazeera’s rendering, that “none of these tariffs are meant to punish or harm India”. Trump had paused the oil tariff, he added, partly because “he understands that it would have a very detrimental impact on a very important relationship with India”. Washington’s foreign policy, he said, “unfortunately, involves a war going on between Russia and Ukraine”. He did not promise the tariff would stay paused: “I think the president is trying very hard to balance that… but it will be a challenge.”
After his talks with Jaishankar, Rubio told reporters the two countries were “about as close as you can be without having executed the agreement”, Fortune reported. That is a long way from Sitharaman’s plateau, and the two assessments came within the same month.
Praveen Donthi, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group in Brussels, sees something larger than one president’s moods. “Under Trump 2.0, the bipartisan consensus on India seems to have ended in Washington,” he said, a sentiment “too strong to be attributed solely to President Trump; it points to the broader American establishment.” These measures, he said, “have brought back distrust of the US among the Indian strategic establishment”, the old Cold War suspicion that the Reagan and Bush years were meant to have ended.
A smaller Trump
The election comes at a bad time for the president. The US-Israel war on Iran, which began in February, set off a global energy crisis, and Americans are paying record prices for gas. His approval ratings are the worst of his political career. If he loses Congress, Democrats gain the power to scrutinise his administration for his last two years in office.
“A chastened Trump would be in India’s interests,” Vaishnav said. Many Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, he argued, are “livid” at how the administration has handled India. Whatever they think of India’s politics and economy, they still believe in the partnership. A Democratic Congress, he said, could have a “moderating impact”.
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst in Washington, doubts it, “at least not when it comes to the question of India”. Trump cannot legally run for a third term, Kugelman noted, and will keep pursuing whatever he thinks best serves American economic interests. “If he thinks that could entail threatening additional tariffs on India, then he would do that.”
So New Delhi is in an odd position. A government that once campaigned for a foreign president in a Texas stadium now does little more than wait for him to leave. Donthi said India hopes relations improve after Trump goes, and that Washington will then take “a more patient, strategic approach”.