Isaac Chotiner
Almost exactly six years ago, Donald Trump and Narendra Modi headlined an event in the Houston Texans’ football stadium called “Howdy, Modi.” Trump, then in his first term as President of the United States, and Modi, just beginning his second term as Prime Minister of India, held hands and waved to a crowd of around fifty thousand people. The two leaders had each risen to power by taking over their country’s dominant conservative parties—in Modi’s case, the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.)—and reorienting them around the demonization of ethnic or religious minorities and the promise of economic competence. During Trump’s Howdy, Modi speech, he said, “You have never had a better friend as President than President Donald Trump, that I can tell you.” There are more than five million people of Indian origin in the U.S., and in three Presidential elections Trump has steadily increased his vote share in that group, from under thirty per cent, in 2016, to nearly forty per cent last year, according to some estimates. (Modi is tremendously popular with the Indian diaspora.)
And yet, despite the fact that Trump is back in office, and Modi was elected to a third consecutive term, the relationship between the two countries is at its lowest point in many years. Earlier this summer, Trump put a twenty-five-per-cent tariff on India; then, in late August, he doubled it to fifty per cent, arguing that the rate was meant to punish India for buying Russian oil. Trump had already enraged some Indians by taking credit for brokering a ceasefire, in May, between India and Pakistan, after the countries had engaged in their worst military conflict in decades. (Pakistan’s government said that it would nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize; Modi, on a tense phone call with Trump, was reportedly unwilling to support such a proposal.) And now Modi, whose country was once seen by Washington as a bulwark against China in Asia, recently visited Tianjin as part of Xi Jinping’s push to create a new global diplomatic architecture without the United States.
To talk about the India-America relationship, I recently spoke by phone with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump has really turned against India, whether Modi’s political standing in India is finally showing some signs of strain, and why Indian Americans have been so quiet about Trump’s India policies.