The Unintended Blessings of Donald Trump

The Honourable Sergio Gor landed this week in India with the aplomb and cockiness befitting a Political Agent of yore. True to form, Modi establishment managers have felt constrained to fawn over a 39-year-old consigliere in the hope that he will restore some kind of warmth to a relationship that has gone cold. It is a different matter that the young man took his own time to assume his ambassadorial duties in New Delhi.

The new envoy is no John Kenneth Galbraith nor is he a Chester Bowles or Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He is neither fascinated nor infatuated with a ‘democratic India.’ He is an unsentimental operative for a brutally unsentimental boss in the Oval Office. He knows that the warmth and the personal chemistry that we in India have attributed to the Trump-Modi ‘huggy’ relationship was a unilateral invention on our part; an invention conjured out of thin air, after spending colossal amounts of Indian taxpayer money, only to sustain the Modi personality cult at home. Our ‘strategic community’ – largely comprising retired and serving diplomats, television anchors and diplomatic correspondents – allowed themselves to be mesmerised by the razzle dazzle of those carefully planned spectacles on foreign soil. The Americans, on their part, remained unimpressed.

The American who remains most unimpressed with Modi’s image making jiu jitsu is none other than the President himself. Without perhaps wanting to do so, Trump has disrupted some of the key elements of the entire Narendra Modi project. In the process, quite a bit of unintended goodness has accrued to the Indian polity.

Let us enumerate a few of the Trump-inflicted blessings.

First, for many years now in India we have not been allowed to criticise – leave alone mock or ridicule – Narendra Modi. Anyone foolish enough to do so ran the risk of inviting a disproportionately coercive response from the authorities; and, the law, as understood and interpreted by the magistrate, invariably, rules against the citizen and in favour of the king.

It has therefore been a bit of an incongruity to see Trump regularly chipping away at Modi’s aura. The US president periodically mimics and mocks or otherwise mauls the dignity and stature of the Indian prime minister; and, even the establishment-oriented media is forced to report the American president’s verbal assault against Modi. He has reduced the prime minister to a Third World leader whose sensitivities and dilemmas are of no concern to Washington. Rather, Trump thinks he has been kind to the Indian PM because he does not want to destroy him politically. Never before has a foreign leader spoken, at least in public, so dismissively and so disparagingly about India’s prime minister.

Second, the recent downturn in US- India ties has brutally exposed the limits and usefulness of the Indian diaspora. The Modi prime ministerial project has been predicated on the presumed heft and clout of the Indian diaspora, willingly and cheerfully available to advance his quest for global stature.

It should be clear to one and all that the Indian diaspora has no interest nor inclination to risk their own status by intervening on behalf of a Naya Bharat.

These successful American-Indians, especially the richest, have sorted out their divided loyalties conundrum. They are Americans citizens and they work for the welfare and prosperity of the country they have chosen to become citizens of. They have no reason to take sides in a Modi-trump ego clash. They have no reason to undermine American foreign policy as defined by an incumbent president. The presence of these high profile Indians and their periodic photo-ops sessions with the prime minister had been used to project a kind of global acceptability for our own strongman, as if they owed their success and achievements to Mr. Modi’s inspirational persona. Now all that carefully staged sleight of hand stands exposed.

For domestic constituencies, particularly the middle classes, Trump’s attitude has weakened the carefully cultivated perception that Modi – as a globally accepted and respected powerful leader – will protect Indians, individually and collectively, from inimical forces inside and outside India. This projected global image had given a sense of comfort and protection to some very dodgy and dubious props of the Modi regime. But not anymore.

In this file image by PMO on Friday, Feb. 14, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi with US President Donald Trump at the White House, in Washington, DC, USA. Photo: PTI

More than anything else, President Trump has vastly undermined one great source of comfort — our sense of superiority over Pakistan. We Indians have been made feel that under Modi we are more than a match to Pakistan and that we have the determination and capacity and the leadership to punish that country at will. All that tall talk mocks us after Operation Sindoor. Trump’s extraordinary hospitality for a Pakistani general has punctured more than one such myth. India today stands totally and fully isolated in the region and the US president can take vicarious pleasure in singlehandedly diminishing Modi’s aura among South Asia’s elites.

Of course, it would be foolish and unrealistic on the part of Indian opposition parties to take comfort from the souring of the Modi-Trump relationship. The American president has no interest whatsoever in renewing the health and vitality of Indian democracy or in reducing the democratic deficits we feel. He has no interest in the preservation of civil liberties and human rights. He has no interest in ensuring that the minorities in India are treated fairly. He is not enamoured of being the saviour of Indian democracy He is a transactional man and a businessman who happens to be in the White House. Therefore, it will be shortsighted on the part of the opposition parties to look to Washington for any comfort or assurance as they try to slow down Modi’s totalitarian journey. It is a battle that must be fought on Indian terms by Indian themselves, alone.

Some otherwise sagacious voices have strained themselves to detect a conciliatory inclination on the part of new American Ambassador. Keep your strategic fingers crossed.

There is little doubt that Trump has managed to rattle Modi’s cage. And the prime minister knows it, even if his cheer-leaders pretend not to have noticed the damage. It is no wonder then that Modi finds himself relying on one and only one source of confidence and legitimacy: the Hindutva paraphernalia. He has already traveled to Somnath, tweaking history to his purpose and exhorting all Indians to remain united. And for good measure, he had the richest Indian, Mukesh Ambani, describe the prime minister as India’s ‘invincible wall’ in these times of global uncertainty.

Tell it to the birds, as they say in America.

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