Why PM Modi may not have taken Trump's calls

TOI correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump often uses his personal cell phone to call world leaders. It's a habit carried over from his life as a real estate magnate when he phoned and received calls from elites of the world. Coming to the White House tempered the practice but did not end it. He was using the cell phone from the get-go, driving both technical security boffins and his National Security Council staff nuts.

While the technical folk worried about security breaches, the NSC folks fretted about being out of the loop about his exchanges with world leaders, which are otherwise carefully noted and annotated as per formal procedures, with calls typically patched through the White House situation room, with domain experts in the loop.

Trump was eventually persuaded to have safeguards and security features on the phone -- an Android device -- well into his first term, similar to what Barack Obama, who was the first president to use a mobile device in office -- a Blackberry -- submitted to. But the random calls continued. When he returned to the Oval Office for a second term, he had added a second device -- an iPhone -- and possibly a third, with which he is said to post on social media, to his collection. A recent photo of him holding an iPhone showed a lockscreen with his own picture in his signature finger-pointing pose -- inviting jibes of narcissism --with a text message from his friend Roger Stone below it.

According to administration insiders, Trump has given out his cell phone number to some half a dozen world leaders, including possibly Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, French President Emanuel Macron, India's PM Narendra Modi, inviting them to call him directly if they needed to discuss important matters urgently. "The president’s personal cellphone has become, in many ways, the most pivotal technological device in the federal government, directly linking Trump to the outside world," The Atlantic magazine wrote recently, adding that "lawmakers, friends, family members, corporate titans, celebrities, world leaders, and journalists regularly call it."

Atlantic writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer are among those who have Trump's personal phone number and have spoken about calling him for an interview. Among journalists who have received Trump's call from his personal number: Fox News' Sean Hannity and British journalist Piers Morgan.

But security boffins are also believed to have persuaded Trump to change the numbers of one or two of his cell phones, because, as the Atlantic noted, more than 100 people now have the number, and he remains prone to picking up the phone, even when he does not recognize the incoming number. So if he phoned PM Modi from a new personal number, how would the latter, who is also known to use a cell phone, know who's calling unless they've exchanged updated numbers?

That may explain why PM Modi apparently didn't take four calls from Trump in recent weeks, as reported by a German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. A Japanese newspaper, Nikkei Asia, carried a similar report about Modi not taking the US president’s calls, “heightening Trump’s frustration”. Officials in Washington declined to either confirm or deny if the calls were made.

Another reason why Modi may not have taken Trump's purported calls is that the US President is now routinely accused of making up stuff -- from out-of-control crime in Washington DC and other Democrat cities with large black population to millions of criminals from prisons and mental asylums from all over the world infiltrating America.

New Delhi, which is big on form, rulebook and protocol, now clearly believes Trump is a loose cannon who is prone to hyperbole and shooting off the cuff with little regard to discretion or accuracy. From throwing out random numbers about the number of fighter jets shot in the India-Pak spat to the imminence of it going nuclear, he has tossed out one verbal hand grenade after another, sometimes based on misrepresentation or misreading of the situation, frustrating his own bureaucracy. No one on the US side or Indian side has a clue how to contain this. The Indian side may also have been concerned about the possibility of Trump pulling a repeat of his antics with the Vietnamese president, where he announced a deal that hadn't been fleshed out, causing considerable confusion and embarrassment in Hanoi.
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