Trump says India will continue paying 'massive' tariffs if Russian oil purchase not restricted

'I spoke with Prime Minister Modi of India, and he said he's not going to be doing the Russian oil thing,' Trump told reporters.

New Delhi: India will pay “a massive tariff” for its exports to the US if it continues to buy oil from Russia, President Donald Trump has warned after quoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi once again as assuring him that the South Asian country would cut down on energy imports from the former Soviet Union nation.

“I spoke with Prime Minister Modi of India, and he said he's not going to be doing the Russian oil thing (buying oil from Russia),” Trump told journalists aboard Air Force One on Sunday.

His comment disregarded New Delhi’s rebuttal to his earlier claim about receiving an assurance from Modi on October 15 that India would not buy oil from Russia.

Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India, stated that the prime minister had not held a phone call with the US president on October 15.

“But I don’t believe he said that. If they want to say that, then they’ll just continue to pay massive tariffs, and they don’t want to do that,” Trump said on Sunday, when journalists pointed out that New Delhi had in fact refuted his claim about assurance from Modi.

The US president had, on August 6, announced an additional 25% tariff – on top of 25% levied just about a week back – on all imports from India. The additional 25% tariff had been imposed to prod India to stop buying oil from Russia.

Trump and his aides, over the past few months, have been giving vent to the disappointment in Washington, D.C., as India continued to buy oil from Russia, defying the sanctions the US and the rest of the West imposed on the former Soviet Union nation to prod it to stop its “special military operations” in Ukraine.

New Delhi, in its response to the claim from the White House in Washington, D.C., had on October 16 avoided an overtly confrontationist approach and stated that India’s import policies had been entirely guided by the objective of safeguarding the interests of consumers in the country.

Without directly clarifying if it would lower the import of oil from Russia, New Delhi had stated that its energy policies included broad-basing and diversifying sources in accordance with market conditions.

Trump, however, reiterated his claim on Sunday, thus casting a shadow of uncertainty over his proposed bilateral meeting with Modi on the sidelines of the ASEAN conclaves and the East Asia summits in Kuala Lumpur from October 26 to 28.

With his repeated claims about being assured by Modi on India cutting down on oil imports from Russia giving munitions to the Congress and the rest of the Opposition to target the government led by Bharatiya Janata Party, New Delhi is likely to assess the implications of such a meeting between the two leaders for domestic politics.

Russia’s share in India’s total crude oil imports rose from less than 2% before the launch of its war in Ukraine in 2022 to around 40% by 2023–24. But, in recent months, Russia’s share had slipped to about 36% of total oil imports of India.

Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal recently said that although a team of officials of the Government of India had gone to Washington, D.C., to discuss the much-awaited trade deal, the ongoing US government shutdown had made it difficult to hold the next official round of negotiations now.

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said that New Delhi would only go for a trade deal when it would be able to adequately safeguard the interests of the farmers, fishermen and the https://www.deccanherald.com/tags/msme

s.

Trump on Sunday also reiterated his claim about brokering the May 10 ceasefire between India and Pakistan – again disregarding multiple rebuttals from New Delhi over the past few months.

“The threat of tariffs, as an example, kept India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, from going at it. They were going at it. Seven planes were shot down, that's a lot. And they were going at it. And that could have been a nuclear war,” the US president said, referring to the May 7-10 cross border military flare-up between the two South Asian nations. “The prime minister of Pakistan actually just said, Donald Trump, President Trump, saved millions of lives by getting that.”

The US president said that he had threatened to impose 200% tariffs on India and Pakistan, which forced them to stop the war.