"US Dollars Not Fuelling Russian War Machine?" Shashi Tharoor Exclusive
US President Donald Trump's "double standards" should be countered head-on and India must not let anybody dictate terms to it, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor told NDTV in an exclusive interview today.
"You can't accept a situation where one side dictates terms and the other side is expected to comply without question. Those days are over. I mean, after 200 years of colonialism, we're not going to let anybody dictate to us like this," he said, days after the US announced a 25 per cent tariff on India in two parts, taking the total to 50 per cent.
Without mincing words, Mr Tharoor slammed Mr Trump - "the famously transactional and unpredictable man" - for the US importing fertilisers worth billions of dollars from Russia, and faulting only India for importing Russian oil.
"Do you realise, for example, that the US itself imports like a couple of billion dollars worth of fertilizers every year from Russia? It buys something called uranium hexafluoride from them. It buys a lot of palladium, which is needed for catalytic converters. In the five months of this year alone, January to May, US imports from Russia stand at $2.4 billion," Mr Tharoor said.
This amount, he added, already represented a 20 per cent increase from last year.
"So, if that's going on, how can Mr Trump argue that India's money is fuelling Russia's war machine in Ukraine, but his American dollars are not? I mean, that's complete hypocrisy. So, I really think we will have to sit and talk to the Americans," said the MP who recently led a delegation of MPs to the US to brief leaders there on India's 'Operation Sindoor'.
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