Who’s scared of tariffs? Trump’s war against Deep State has served India’s interests and will restore trust in ties – Firstpost

A lot has changed since Narendra Modi last went on a trip to Washington DC. It was a formal state visit in June 2024 at the invitation of then US president Joe Biden. On that occasion, a Pakistani American reporter from Wall Street Journal, carefully chosen by the White House, tried to ‘embarrass’ the prime minister during the presser on “discrimination in India against religious minorities”, an oft-repeated western media thuggery.

That was then. The world was perhaps still not fully aware of the scale of Orwellian dystopia – the myriad tools America’s uniparty globalists employ to wage war against nationalist leaders in the garb of “safeguarding democracy and human rights”, and the way they manipulate and control the levers of global media to achieve their objectives.

Then Donald Trump won an election, DOGE was created, and it cut off the head of Medusa.

The Deep State is still licking its wounds. Entities that were carefully put in place over decades to further the cause of Deep State and implement its progressive agendas are now running around like headless chickens.

The scythe that Elon Musk and his team, at the direction of Trump, took to the USAID has severed the umbilical cord between the mothership of foreign interference and various arms of the octopus, leaving the globalist elite apoplectic with rage.

Elections have consequences. What we are witnessing in the US right now is nothing short of a conservative revolution within the confines of an electoral democracy. And the repercussions of this revolution are being felt at once.

For instance, while watching the Modi-Trump press conference at an ungodly hour in India, I couldn’t help but notice how Deep State agenda-driven questions were noticeably less during the Modi-Trump presser that went on for quite some time. Modi had clearly set aside his scepticism for journalists. The questions were geared towards seeking information, not peddling of agendas. The cleaning of the DC swamp is bearing fruit.

Trump was even asked about the events in Bangladesh and the ongoing crisis. He said, “
I’ll leave Bangladesh to PM Modi”. Was he referring to the question, and not the issue per se? Perhaps. But it was a pointer to the changed circumstances and restoration of trust in bilateral ties that in the later Biden years (or whoever were in charge in the senile president’s name) took countless hits.

Defence supplies from US were
deliberately delayed citing ‘supply chain’ issues, Quad meeting was postponed, Khalistanis were invited for a secretive ‘meeting’ inside the White House just ahead of Modi’s visit, Indian intelligence agencies were targeted over an alleged “transnational repression” of a Khalistani terrorist based in New York, and
an Indian businessman was indicted by Biden’s Department of Justice, an action that has now been questioned by six American lawmakers.

This is a different world already. Trump’s win has dealt a body blow to woke ideology and corporate America is falling in line. Google has quietly dropped Pride Month, Black History Month and other diversity holidays from its calendar, signifying reversal of woke cultural agendas. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is shutting down “fact-checking” programs from its social media apps, while companies such as JP Morgan Chase are rolling back DEI mechanisms.

The wave has reached even in Europe where right-wing populist parties are in the ascendancy. In Germany, for instance, to stave off the challenge from AfD, beleaguered German chancellor Olaf Scholz is calling for deportation of migrants after a terrorist attack by an Afghan asylum-seeker. This was until recently, unthinkable.

In declaring the extradition of 26/11 Mumbai terror attack accused Tahawwur Rana to India during the presser, on the question of Khalistani separatists and other malcontents carrying out subversive activities against India from US soil, Trump minced no words.

“I don’t think India had a good relationship with the Biden administration…A lot of things happened that weren’t very appropriate between India and the Biden Administration. We are giving a very violent man (Tahawwur Rana) back to India immediately. There are more to follow because we have quite a few requests. So, we work with India on crime and we want to make it good for India…”

The joint statement released after the Modi-Trump meeting puts the cooperation on crime on firmer footing. “The leaders also committed to strengthen law enforcement cooperation to take decisive action against illegal immigration networks, organized crime syndicates, including narco-terrorists human and arms traffickers, as well as other elements who threaten public and diplomatic safety and security, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of both nations.”

The difference is also evident in body language. Trump greeted Modi with a handshake and a hearty embrace at the White House, saying, “We missed you, we missed you a lot.” For a leader who prefers to be more direct with utterances and gestures and cares little for diplomatic niceties, Trump went out of the way to pull a chair for the prime minister, gifted his book ‘Our Journey Together’ with an inscription that read, “Mr. Prime Minister, You Are Great” and introduced him during the joint press conference as a “special man”.

The camaraderie is a signifier of a relationship that may finally flower and reach its promised potential without getting hamstrung by value-evangelism by the earlier administration that saw a threat in nationalist governments led by strong, popular leaders and sought to curb their influence by sponsoring a million mutinies through an intricate funding network, all within the confines of plausible deniability.

Thanks to DOGE, and the unravelling of the hydra-headed monster named USAID, we now have an inkling of the massive amount of sludge fund employed by the American administrative state to champion global progressive causes and bring insubordinate, nationalist governments to heel through a swampy network of NGOs, entities and cronies geared towards regime change and destabilization of popular democratic movements that do not align with Washington’s strategic interests.

In that respect, Modi and Trump have shared enemies.

While sovereigns, especially democracies such as India shall not tolerate interference in their domestic politics under the garb of ‘development’ by a globalist elite bent on running nefarious agendas, for American people who voted for Trump and gave him the mandate to go after the political class that sees itself as immune from voter accountability, the priority is to cut drastically the size of perma-bureaucracy that holds power within an incestuous cabal, and prevent American taxpayers from getting ripped off by the administrative state that doles out money to fringe Left-wing NGOs for exporting woke ideology abroad, trigger soft regime change operations and drag Americans into ‘forever wars’.

This synergy of interests may explain why India, unlike countries in Europe, instead of panicking at Trump’s return to White House appeared quietly confident of improving the state of bilateral ties.

In absence of ‘pro-democracy’ and ‘human rights’ meddling, liberal hegemonic tools that the American foreign policy establishment uses to ‘remake the world in its image’, Trump’s America is already taking a more realist turn, albeit driven by a more transactionalist foreign policy. It suits New Delhi.

The jury is out whether Trump’s first few weeks has shown an ‘America First’ or an ‘America More’ approach, but the dovetailing of interests with India, which could become America’s most consequential partner, couldn’t be clearer.

Most of Trump’s nominations, such as secretary of state Marco Rubio or Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, are strong votaries of close India-US partnership, and sceptical of India’s greatest adversary, China. As a US senator, Rubio had introduced the US-India Defence Cooperation Act that aimed to treat India on a par with America’s treaty allies such as Japan and Israel on defence partnership and technology transfers.

Gabbard, a Hindu American, is another proponent of strong bilateral ties, and was among the first in Trump’s team to meet the prime minister on his visit to Washington. Their meeting covered areas such as enhancing intelligence cooperation in counter-terrorism, cybersecurity and emerging threats.

Close on the heels of Modi’s arrival, the Trump administration nominated Paul Kapur, a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval Postgraduate School, as the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. A strong backer of close India-US ties and a trenchant critic of Pakistan’s security state, Kapur, if nominated, will take over from Donald Lu as Trump’s South Asia pointman within the US State Department.

According to Christopher Clary of Washington DC-based Stimson Center, Kapur, a critic of Biden-era India policy, “views India as a top-tier strategic relationship for the US” and will likely “be more skeptical of Pakistan than any previous incumbent of that office”.

The chips are falling in place for greater authenticity in bilateral ties.

This does not mean that there won’t be challenges. With Modi standing alongside, Trump was quite explicit during the presser that India is among the nations with the highest among of tariffs, that he deems as “unfair”, that limits America’s access to the Indian market, and “really it’s a big problem I must say”. In typical Trump fashion, he announced “reciprocal tariffs” on India and said at the press conference that “Whatever India charges, we charge them.” In reply, Modi said, “One thing that I deeply appreciate, and I learn from President Trump, is that he keeps the national interest supreme… Like him, I also keep the national interest of India at the top of everything else.”

This may indicate a roadblock, and yet the joint statement mentions a goal of negotiating the first tranche of a “mutually beneficial, multi-sector Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) by fall of 2025” based on “new, fair trade terms” and a larger goal of reaching $500 billion in bilateral trade by 2030.

In his briefing, India’s foreign secretary Vikram Misri said that the issue of tariffs “did figure in some detail in the discussions”, and “both countries will take an integrated approach to strengthen bilateral trade across the goods and services sector. This will include themes such as increasing market access, reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers and deepening supply chain integration between the two countries.”

The underlying theme that emerges is that when nationalist leaders meet with a common agenda to ‘protect’ their countries’ interests, it results in a transactionalist policymaking sans ideological framework that may be surprisingly successful. While India understands that there would be give-and-take with Trump on trade, it also opens up simultaneous possibilities on strengthening partnership across other domains. A Trump fixated on a trade ‘win’ to show to his base, may be malleable to dealmaking in other avenues.

Besides, an India obsessed with protectionism may let go of opportunities to be a part of global supply chains as countries look to diversify. In that sense, even if Trump induced, a drop in India’s tariff rate may be the bitter pill that Indian economy needed.

What we should not lose sight of, in all the focus on “reciprocal tariffs”, is that Trump’s war against the Deep State has served India’s interests, and has laid the foundation for a truer partnership. Transactionalism may be a dirty word in liberal lexicon, but a transactional Trump that looks out for American public’s interests is a far more preferred and sincere partner for an India tired of USAID operations aimed at subverting India’s sovereignty.

The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.