The only thing remarkable about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hastily prepared visit to Washington D.C. was the fact that he had two interactions with the media. A rarity for Modi. As it turns out, Indian diplomats managed to keep all independent-minded Indian journalists out of the room and squeezed in friendly ones who managed to embarrass the profession with servile behaviour and inane questions. If one Indian journalist used up her time to praise President Donald Trump, another was snubbed by the president who said he did not understand what was said and moved on.
The fact is that Washington D.C. is one of the rare capitals in the world that has a few competent Indian correspondents such as a veteran like Chidanand Rajghatta. Most major capitals around the world have no representation from the Indian media. In the past this vacuum was filled by the prime minister allowing senior and highly regarded Indian journalists to travel in the PM’s plane. Tough questions would be asked and news worthy of publication would emanate. Modi ended this practice along with refusing to freely interact with the media overseas.
Getting Modi to face the media, albeit selected Indians, was not the only burden that President Trump imposed on his visitor. The day the two met began with the president announcing reciprocal tariffs that would hit Indian exports and force India to further bring down its tariff barriers. A reduction in customs duties is an advisable policy intervention that many, including Prime Minister Modi’s close advisers, have long recommended but the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been reluctant to bite this bullet. Now, under pressure from Trump, some action may well be forthcoming. Already the Union Budget had taken some pre-emptive action, but President Trump wants more.
Apart from seeking lower tariffs, the head of the world’s most powerful government, with an economy whose per capita income is more than ten times that of India’s, also ensured commitments from India to purchase more defence equipment. What in turn did he do for his visitor? One could view the temporary suspension of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) as a huge favour, given that it immediately and directly benefits an Indian billionaire. The FCPA was enacted in 1977 aimed at preventing US firms from bribing foreign government officials to help secure business overseas.
President Trump was right to say that the FCPA had handicapped US firms overseas given that most other governments had no such constraints and were happily bribing overseas officials to secure business for their firms. However, ever since the term of the late Jimmy Carter, when the FCPA was introduced, the US prided itself in not deploying bribes overseas to secure business for its firms. The fact is that the US had deployed other means to secure business overseas when it wanted to. However, as US firms lost competitiveness, they found themselves at a disadvantage in this regard.
The case relating to the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani points to favours done to the former government of Andhra Pradesh in return for business advantage secured in which a US firm was also involved. Adani was charged with wrongdoing under the FCPA by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Curiously, neither the Government of India nor the present state government in Andhra Pradesh has acted on the charges made. It has been business as usual in India and now it will be business as usual in the US. That’s a huge favour to a private individual in India from President Trump and he has managed to get defence purchase orders from the Indian government in exchange.
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In the week that Prime Minister Modi was visiting Washington, the Trump administration made a startling move reaching out to both China and Russia. While President Vladimir Putin has invited both President Xi Jinping and President Trump to Moscow, as guests at the 80th anniversary celebrations of the Victory in Europe Day in May, President Xi Jinping has invited Mr Putin and Mr Trump to Beijing. There’s a threesome in the making, and geopolitical analysts have all become excited recalling Yalta. The Yalta conference of February 1945 was a meeting of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the then Soviet Union’s dictator Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Between the three – the victors of the Second World War – they agreed to the terms on which peace would be restored.
A Trump-Xi-Putin summit could help resolve the wars in Europe and Middle East but to imagine that they would define a new world order in the manner that FDR, Stalin and Churchill did is a bit fanciful. Of course, they could if leaders of countries like India, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa and so on fall in line like the rest of the world did in 1945. Neither has the United States nor Russia nor indeed China won any war in 2025 for them to sit down in a Yalta-like conference to design the world for the 21st century.
Something has happened since 1945 that makes the world of 2025 very different. The US is defending its space. Russia is trying to regain its lost space and China is expanding its space. Around all of them there are countries with a mind of their own and some bargaining capacity. The notion that the Big Three can sit down and agree that Greenland belongs to the US, Ukraine belongs to Russia and Taiwan belongs to China and then the rest of the world will fall in line and clap is bereft of a sense of history.
The free peoples of post-colonial nations as well as the middle powers around the world, including Germany, France, Japan and, hopefully India, would want to know where they stand in this so-called grand bargain of a Yalta 2.0. I say hopefully, because India has conveyed mixed signals in this past month. There has been avoidable nervousness on India’s part in dealing with a Trump victory. The servility of the Indian media at the Trump-Modi press meetings may have convinced many that India is willing to bend, if not crawl.
This article was originally published in Deccan Chronicle. It has been lightly edited for style.
