TOI correspondent from Washington: Slipping into damage control mode after he and his lieutenants singed ties with India with incendiary remarks, US President Donald Trump on Friday said US and India have a special relationship and there is "nothing to worry about."
Hours after his "Truth Social" post saying he had lost India and Russia to China, Trump did an about turn in a White House chat with media, asserting, “I don’t think we have (lost India). I’m disappointed that India is buying Russian oil and I’ve let them know with very big tariff...50% tariff."
"I will always be friends with Modi... he is a great Prime Minister, ... I just don't like what he is doing at this particular moment, but India and the United States have a special relationship. There is nothing to worry about," Trump said, when asked by ANI if he is ready to reset the relationship.
The remarks came after New Delhi bluntly rejected US demand that it stop buying Russian oil, with finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman defiantly saying, “Where we buy our oil from, especially a big-ticket foreign exchange item...we will have to take a call on what suits us best.”
“We will undoubtedly be buying (Russian oil),” she told CNN-IBM. Separately, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal adopted a more conciliatory tone, saying the trade row was just a temporary wrinkle in an otherwise consequential relationship that will not be easily derailed.
That message came after US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick publicly laid out a laundry list of US demands from India, including not buying Russian oil and pulling out of BRICS and predicted that India would make a trade deal with Trump within two months after saying sorry.
Separately, White House trade counselor Peter Navarro, Lutnick's comrade-in-incendiary rhetoric, reacted to a Washington Post story about the damage he is doing to the relationship, saying "India can't handle truth/spins @washpo Leftist American fake news." Navarro has accused India of being "Kremlin's laundromat" and characterized the Russia-Ukraine war as "Modi's war" among other offensive comments.
Ridiculed even in the US for faking quotes for his book, Navarro and his MAGA cohorts are now canvassing for tariffing foreign remote workers, including outsourcing to India, action that would tip the relationship into uncharted territory.
Trump's latest on Modi: I get along very well with Modi. In fact, we went to the Rose Garden and the grass was so soaking wet. It was such a terrible place to have a news conference. I said, well, let's use a beautiful white stone, emblematic of the White House, and it's been very well received. But we had a news conference on the grass. It was my last news conference I had on the grass because everybody sunk in. You probably sunk in. Every reporter out there, they ruined their shoes.
Rajghatta is author of Kamala Harris: Phenomenal Woman