'Modi's War', 'Performative': As Tariffs Kick in, the View From US Advisors

New Delhi: India has been struck with a 50% tariff card for its exports to the US. On the day on which the new rates came into effect, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that he had initially thought that India will be one of the countries which will have struck an early trade deal with the US.

Bessent told Fox Business channel on August 27 that India has been "profiteering on" Russian crude oil purchases as well.

“This is a complicated relationship. President Trump and Prime Minister Modi have a very good relationship at that level. It’s not just over the Russian oil. The Indians came in early after Liberation Day to start negotiating on tariffs and we still don’t have a deal. I thought we would have a deal in May or June. I thought India could be one of the earlier deals and they kind of tapped us along in terms of the negotiations and then there is also the aspect of the Russian crude purchases which they’ve been profiteering on,” Bessent said.

'Complicated relationship' is also the phrase used by US adviser Kevin Hassett with reporters. The director of the National Economic Council of the United States, “If the Indians don’t budge, I don’t think President Trump will."

In the Fox interivew, Bessent said that he believed that a lot of "it" has been performative for Indians – alluding presumably to New Delhi's stance in trade negotiations.

“There’s many levels going on here. I do think India’s the world largest democracy; the US is the world’s largest economy. I think at the end of the day we will come together. I think a lot of it by the Indians has been performative. I’ve said it all along during the tariff negotiations. The US is the deficit country. When there is a schism in trade relations, the deficit country (is) at an advantage. It’s the surplus country that should worry. So, the Indians are selling to us. They have very high tariffs and we have a very large deficit with them,” he said.

Tellingly, Bessent said that he was not worried about the rupee taking the US dollar's place as a reserve currency. BRICS countries have been cautiously putting forth the idea that a new "BRICS currency" could be used to beat the dollar's hegemony.

“There are a lot of things I worry about. The rupee becoming a reserve currency isn’t one of them. I think the rupee is near an all-time low versus the US dollar," Bessent said.

The Indian rupee, under pressure of the tariff hikes, has been stabilised with likely Reserve Bank of India support. It opened at 87.51 against the US dollar today (August 28), as compared to 87.68 at previous close.

'Modi's war'

Half of Washington's 50% tariffs on India is supposed "penalty" for the fact that New Delhi has continued to purchase oils from Russia, which is at war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, controversial White House trade adviser Peter Navarro described Russia's war in Ukraine as "Modi's war" at a Bloomberg TV interview.

“Everybody in America loses because of what India is doing. The consumers and businesses and everything lose, and workers lose because India’s high tariffs cost us jobs, and factories, and income and higher wages. And then the taxpayers lose because we got to fund Modi’s war,” he said during the interview.

When anchor asked him if he meant to say "Putin's war", Navarro replied, "I mean Modi's war, because the road to peace runs, in part, through New Delhi."

Navarro has accused India of bankrolling Putin’s war earlier as well. “If India wants to be treated as a strategic partner of the US, it needs to start acting like one,” he wrote in an op-ed in Financial Times last week.

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