India must not bend to please Trump

It should instead use the Trump playbook and push its own set of non-negotiables

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has met Donald Trump, the 47th US President who is busy executing his wild project to reorder the world. In this, Modi became one of the few leaders to meet Trump in the first flush of his disruptive presidency. The New York Times put it rather well in its early reporting on the meeting: “...it became clear that Modi was the latest leader to placate Trump.”

There is, in principle, nothing wrong in placating a powerful world leader who has been described varyingly as narcissistic, egotistic, even solipsistic. But placating is different from an overzealous endorsement of positions and policies that have raised many questions and worries across the globe. India started with the former by praising Trump as an inspiring leader. But somewhere this slipped into different territory when the idea of a Viksit Bharat (developed India) got transcribed into the language of MAGA politics.

This is how Modi put it: “If I say in the language of America, developed India means Make India Great Again, i.e. ‘MIGA’. When the United States and India work together, i.e. ‘MAGA’ plus ‘MIGA’, the ‘mega’ partnership for prosperity is formed. And this mega spirit gives new scale and scope to our goals.” The effusive language came despite the fact that Trump unhesitatingly announced reciprocal tariffs that would clearly impact India and in fact, underlined the tariffs in his remarks with Modi, calling out India as “just about the highest tariffs nation in the world”. He added for good measure that “whatever India charges, we will charge them.”

It was always clear that Trump would play by his own rules, and put India under pressure, as indeed he has done with other nations. Some of his ways are based on simplistic ideas set out in his book Art of the Deal – a cocky real estate developer’s manual stretched thin to apply to other fields, and to life itself. Chapter 2 of the vintage 1997 book, republished in a mass market edition in 2005, is titled Trump Cards: The Elements of the Deal and it begins thus: “My style of deal making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes, I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”

American foreign policy has always been about American interests, marked by short-termism and an instrumentality that has many of its claims to principles of openness, democracy or peace sound hollow. Now, the mask is off, the pretence of values is gone, and naked power-play is at work. India will need to carefully navigate this partnership, expecting to be pushed, and so has to be ready with its own list of asks and redlines and non-negotiables. In short, the Trump playbook will have to be used against Trump.

Politics in play

Modi, and India, would be helped in this if the nation has a foreign policy approach that all political parties could sign up and profess as the agreed Indian consensus. In this, the BJP needs the Congress and other parties on its side to make strong, clear and specific demands on Trump instead of caving in on every ask made from the other side. But political bitterness has been brought even to foreign affairs, the bureaucrat-turned-foreign minister S Jaishankar personally feeding into some of it with barbs against Opposition leaders that apparently secure his position in the BJP and with the Prime Minister. Without this forced injection of bitterness, it should not have been difficult to have an all-party consensus to publicly condemn the way the Trump administration has begun the deportation of unauthorised Indians.

The use of a military plane, with Indian citizens under deportation orders set in chains, and the act duly promoted in a video by the US agencies, is in poor taste and tries to showcase a negative image of India at the cost of dignity
and rights of Indian citizens. It is shocking that Indians are being treated
no different from migrants who have been called “high threat criminal
illegal aliens”.

India should condemn the US for treating Indians thus. The Prime Minister chose not to speak out on this openly. However, he correctly pointed out that gangs who help smuggle people illegally across borders must be curbed and that those who are poor are being misled and lured into a trap. This is the correct position. But the next logical step is to ask Americans not to treat Indians found to be undocumented as criminals, or put them in shackles as they are sent back. Instead, the Indian foreign minister has earlier been quoted as saying that this is normal procedure for the US. “The standard operating procedure for deportations by aircraft used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the US) that is effective from 2012, provides for the use of restraints,” he said. How does this help at all? Is Jaishankar, the foreign minister of a Vishwaguru nation not ashamed about this treatment of ordinary Indians?

The planned deportation of 20,000 Indians from the US will require an endless stream of flights, if all are to be sent back, not to speak of more who are being caught as raids by US immigration continue. None of them should be allowed to be detained without access to lawyers, medical aid and humane conditions at the facilities they are kept in. None of them should be allowed to be sent back in chains. This is not to speak of other issues on which Trump will continue to push as teams from the two nations iron out energy deals and defence supplies. India can play along but only up to a point. It is important to draw a clear line beyond which India will not give in.

(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR; Syndicate: The Billion Press)