Salvaging a Friendship

BY THE TIME this column is read, the meeting between US President Donald J Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, may have occurred. That too on the auspicious occasion of India’s Independence Day.

Yes, we are all for India First or MIGA— Make India Great Again. But does that mean anti-America or, to use bridge parlance, “No Trump”? On the contrary, regardless of whether Trump and Putin succeed in calling an end to the war in Ukraine, the Trump-Putin confabulation—or should I say contretemps— will give India an opportunity to dial back on the escalating tension with the US.

For a moment, let’s leave aside our rising frustration with Trump and turn our gaze on ourselves. After all, isn’t introspection the Sanatani forte? Could it be that we mistook, if not miscalculated, how to handle Trump and the US?

Let’s set aside the rhetoric of our rightwingers, who have already declared India and its leadership to be world, and of course, Trump-trouncers. Because sagacity, not shrillness, is the need of the hour.

But first things first. The US is still the sole global superpower, with the biggest economy and strongest military. It not only has bases all over the world, but trade, strategic, and diplomatic treaties with some 200 nations. It is a powerhouse of innovation and technology. It is the oldest democracy in the world. Whether hard, soft, or smart power, the US is still number one.

True that China, our neighbour, is number two, a regional hegemon, and the second-largest economy, besides being the world’s foundry and factory. But can we trust China? No. No other country, other than Pakistan, is as invested in preventing India’s “peaceful rise”, to borrow a phrase from its own vocabulary.

And India? The world’s most populous nation and largest democracy, soon to be the fourth-largest economy too. Yes, we are a rising power, no doubt, but still a rather poor country by most global standards.

Now let’s try to make sense of the facts. Let us acknowledge that the US is our biggest trading partner. Not China. Moreover, we have a trade deficit of close to $100 billion with China. In contrast, we have a trade surplus with the US of close to $40 billion. What this means in plainspeak, an idiom much under attack in India, is that the US, albeit indirectly, is subsiding our imports from China. Can we afford to lose this subsidy?

Let’s turn our attention now to the bone of contention, our Russian oil imports. How many people know that these have risen sharply from about 1 per cent before the Ukraine war to over 35 per cent last year?

INDIA HAS, no doubt, profited by buying cheap oil from Russia. But hasn’t this massive purchase, amounting to over $55 billion last year, helped Russia fund its war in Ukraine?

If Trump wants, above all, to stop this war, wouldn’t it be logical on his part to press down hard on India’s imports of Russian oil? As an aside, let us not forget that the benefits of the huge amount of money we saved in Russian oil were not passed on to the Indian consumers.

Closer home, when it comes to intervening in, if not stopping, the recent India-Pakistan skirmish, can anyone deny that the US played a key role? Why quibble over who called whom and who is trying to steal credit? Go back in history. Didn’t the US, more specifically, President Bill Clinton, intervene to stop the Kargil conflict too? Even further back, didn’t our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru write two frantic, pleading letters to US President John F Kennedy to save us when China invaded India in 1962? What about the 1965 war with Pakistan? Who played a key role—the other superpower, the Soviet Union. In Tashkent. We know what happened there. Lal Bahadur Shastri, our second prime minister, died—many allege, was poisoned— and Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, installed as India’s third prime minister. Can we deny that superpowers have played a major role in our region, even to the extent of creating Pakistan itself, as our British rulers did before transferring power to two, not one, countries.

Again, in 1971, could the creation of Bangladesh

have transpired without the sanction of both the world’s then superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union? And what about the recent regime change in Bangladesh? Doesn’t the evidential needle of suspicion point to the US which used Pakistan’s state and extra-state agencies as its cat’s paw? What was India able to do to prevent this or protect ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina except to give her refuge in India?

Throughout our food-deprived decades, who sent an estimated over 50 million tonnes of foodgrains to help feed us even though we couldn’t afford to pay? The US. In fact, since World War II, the total aid disbursed by the US around the world is an enormous $3.8 trillion. Our Green Revolution was triggered by US intervention as were many beneficial public health initiatives, including the eradication of smallpox and polio.

India’s IT and pharma revolutions, which funneled our growth and still sustain our middle and rising classes when government employment is shrinking, owe so much to US companies and patronage. We have a very large and very prosperous diaspora in the US, unmatched in power and prestige anywhere else in the world. For born-again Sanatanis, the US also has the largest number of Hindu temples anywhere in the world outside of India.

I am not saying that the US is saintly or that we are ungrateful; far from it. The US plays dirty when it needs to and quite often, when it does not. Pakistan, including Khalistan, are prime, but not the sole examples.

If not the US, whom can we partner? China? After how they invaded India and still hold Indian territory the size of Switzerland? When we have an ongoing border dispute, with our two armies in an eyeball-to-eyeball standoff? When we have officially declared that Pakistan received real-time support and expertise from China during Operation Sindoor?

Given all this, what is the harm in giving the US president some credit for intervening in the India-Pakistan war? Even nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize? If in return, our economic and strategic partnership strengthens, as it should, wouldn’t we be better off? What if the US squeezes our IT and pharma sectors, who would be the greater loser? Apart from the tariffs on goods, what if the US sanctions our service industry too?

When it comes to our conventional exports, whom do the higher tariffs hurt the most? The state of Gujarat, which is the hub of our diamond and gemstone business, which apart from IT is our No 1 export?

This is not the time to go for broke—or risk going broke. It’s time to focus, instead, on rokda, cold hard cash. There are no limits to the India-US partnership, our External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said not too long back. The time has come to return to that theme and to restore this alliance.

diplomacyGeoeconomyIndia-US relationshipsoft power of Indian diasporatrade tariffTrump-Putin meet