EAM Jaishankar to represent India at Donald Trump's swearing-in ceremony on January 20

New Delhi: With Donald Trump returning to the Oval Office in the White House on January 20, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will be in Washington DC on January 20 to represent the Government of India at the ceremony that will mark the inauguration of the 47^th president of the United States.

Trump invited some foreign leaders, like President Xi Jinping of China, President Xavier Milei of Argentina, Prime Minister Giorgia Melony of Italy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, to his second inauguration.

Xi, himself, may not travel to Washington DC. But he is likely to send a senior official to attend the ceremony, in a departure from the past practice of Beijing’s envoy to Washington DC representing the government of the communist country in the inaugurations of the US presidents.

Some of the other foreign leaders, however, may turn up in Washington DC to witness Trump and J D Vance being sworn in as the president and vice-president of the US.

Whether Trump invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi or not remained a subject of speculation over the past several weeks. New Delhi, however, ended all speculation on Sunday, with the Ministry of External Affairs confirming that Jaishankar would represent the Government of India at the ceremony, “on the invitation of the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee”.

Jaishankar will also have meetings with representatives of the incoming administration in Washington DC, apart from some other dignitaries visiting the US on that occasion, a spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs said in New Delhi.

The External Affairs minister visited Washington DC from December 24 to 29, 2024. He met Michael Waltz, who would soon take over as the National Security Advisor to the new US president. He also had a meeting with outgoing US NSA, Jake Sullivan, who early this month visited New Delhi in the last engagement of the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden with the Government of India.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Michigan a few weeks before the November 5, 2024, US presidential elections, Trump had called Modi “a fantastic man” but also put him on the spot by announcing that the prime minister would meet him during his visit to the US. Modi did meet Biden in Delaware on September 21 and visited New York for the UN Summit of the Future on September 23, 2024, but returned to New Delhi without meeting Trump or his rival Kamala Harris.

Trump recently once again threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from India, alleging that it charged a lot on exports from the US.

The prime minister and the US president-elect have a chequered history, notwithstanding the bonhomie publicly displayed at the “Howdy! Modi” event in Texas in September 2019 and its sequel “Namaste! Trump” in Ahmedabad in February 2020.

Trump had earlier publicly ridiculed Modi after the latter had called the then US president to inform him about his government’s decision to slash tariff on the import of Harley Davidson motorcycles from the US to India by 50%. He had in the same year scrapped the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) privilege for the exporters of India in the US.

He had also belittled India’s support to the development projects in Afghanistan. In April 2020, Trump had warned of “retaliation” if India had not allowed the export of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for COVID-19 patients in the US. He had even alleged that the Modi Government had been underreporting the number of people who had died of COVID-19 in India.