Trump tantrums complicate India's strategic challenges

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

There's something about Donald Trump's outbursts against India, which even benchmarked by his own standards, feel more unhinged than usual. Particularly revealing is the so-called threat of penalty against India for purchasing oil from Russia, as if India were a recalcitrant schoolkid and the American President our class monitor. Trump's attacks on India — the uncouth language and sneering style — seem to be personally motivated, well beyond the stated aim of rebalancing US trade numbers. (AFP)
There is zero ideology at play here.
Until a few months ago, Trump called Vladimir Putin smart and a friend. He thought nothing of shouting, as cameras captured it all, at Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's President, inside the Oval Office. And let's not forget that in his first election, his political opponents accused his campaign of being influenced by Russia. Trump has been dreaming of a rare earths deal with either Kyiv or Moscow.
So to hector India on relations with Russia is not just out of line; it's a display of staggering hypocrisy.
Trump's attacks on India — the uncouth language and sneering style — seem to be personally motivated, well beyond the stated aim of rebalancing US trade numbers. If one were to borrow from the language of therapy and gender studies, these are the irrational rants of a bruised male ego hell bent on gaslighting his partner with bullying tactics and fantastical claims.
What pushed Trump, never known for reasonableness, over the edge?
Trump's obsessive fixation on his administration's role in Operation Sindoor is positively weird. Do you remember Bill Clinton talking like this when he read the riot act to then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the middle of the Kargil war of 1999? Or David Cameron, UK's Prime minister during the 26/11 terror attacks making a song and dance of the fact that he and members of his government had been working the phone lines to leaders in both India and Pakistan.
The world will get involved in any military conflict between two nuclear nations. India will leverage global diplomacy to underscore concerns on terrorism emanating out of Pakistan. Pakistan will create deliberate panic about the threat of a nuclear conflict to get the world to pay attention. All this is par for the course. This is nowhere close to another nation being allowed to set the terms for a peace pact or having a seat at the table when this is thrashed out.
But Trump can't seem to separate a front channel from a back channel. And is driven by puerile self-aggrandisement.
Is it pure coincidence that Trump's announcement came just hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's elaboration of the US role in Operation Sindoor and the calls from American VP JD Vance? From the floor of Parliament, Modi asserted that Indian airpower had brought Pakistan to its knees. And that when Vance called, India made it clear that the call for a cessation in hostilities would have to come from the Pakistani DGMO. If Trump were looking for flattery and a thank you card, he did not get anything remotely close to it.
Did this tip him over? Or was it that he simply could not get the trade deal he wanted?
Either way, it reveals the trade deal-for-ceasefire claim to be absolutely hollow. If anything, it shows Indian negotiators held their ground, sending him into a spiral. What's less clear is why we are still part of these trade negotiations.
Yes, it's true that the rising tensions between India and America have only added to our basket of strategic challenges.
What former Chief of Defence Staff Bipin Rawat used to call the threat of a two-and-a-half front war has clearly snowballed into a three-and-a-half front conflict scenario. Pakistan is structurally and institutionally committed to waging a proxy war against India. Its patron-in-chief, China provides it not just weaponry, but live inputs during the Operation Sindoor war as confirmed by the Army. And relations with Bangladesh have entered a new phase of friction. China has already used money to convert Pakistan into a vassal State. Now it's trying a similar debt diplomacy with Dhaka. In June, China hosted a trilateral meeting of foreign secretaries from Pakistan and Bangladesh in Kunming. It is quite obviously trying to build an alternative grouping to the Saarc. The neighbourhood game may not be conclusively settled: Bangladesh is a work in progress. But the writing on the wall is clear.
India is in the middle of a wary rapprochement process with China but let's not forget the revelation of the deputy Army chief Lt General Rahul Singh 'China used Pakistan like a borrowed knife against India'. The friction with America could not, in that sense, have come at a more delicate time.
But surely the answer is not to allow a bully to trample all over our self-respect as Indians. I respect the diplomats who argue that hunkering down and negotiating on the quiet is in India's best interests. But speaking from sheer sentiment, why not call out the business links between Trump's family and Pakistan? World Liberty Financial, a privately owned US crypto firm reported to have a majority shareholding by the Trump family, has signed a deal in April with the hastily convened Crypto Council in Pakistan. We often say, Trump is first a businessman and then a President. So why are more questions not being asked about this agreement signed just days after the Pahalgam attack.
As veteran diplomat Dilip Sinha told me, 'India's challenge is how to save the relationship with the US from the chaos that Trump has created.' Agreed. But sometimes the best practice with a bully is to ignore him. Walking away is less harmful than staying in when the other circumstances are not changing.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and writer. The views expressed are personal.