That electric September night three years ago now seems like a distant dream.
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Visiting the United States for the first time after being elected India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi was soaking up the spotlight at a Madison Square Garden extravaganza. Cheered on by nearly 20,000 Indian Americans, he delivered a stirring “I have a dream” speech underlining India’s rise, the success of the Indian diaspora, and the strength of the bonds that tie the world’s two biggest democracies. India would never look back, he promised, from his revolving stage. As Modi prepares to meet Donald Trump for the first time on Monday, a nervous India now looks back wistfully at those golden Barack Obama years of India-US relations when it used to be the star of the show.
US President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visit the National Martin Luther King Memorial. Photo: Reuters
In a nod to the anti-immigrant ethos of the new administration and the heat on Indian software engineers supposedly stealing American jobs, this time Modi is keeping his meeting with Indians abroad as low-key as possible. Compared with the usual hype and fanfare of his foreign visits, his public engagements during the two-day US trip have been kept to a bare minimum in keeping with the uncertainty of the times.
Just days before the meeting, Trump singled out India for trying to extract “billions and billions and billions” of dollars in foreign aid to sign up for the Paris climate agreement, drawing an angry response from New Delhi. The strategic and ideological moorings that have anchored US-India relations in the past, such as the Asia pivot and democracy, have clearly loosened, and no one has the faintest on Trump’s position on India. More importantly, if he even has one. More than pressing flesh, Modi’s top priority is to feel out the new White House and find out. This time, there’s just one handshake that matters.
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US President Donald Trump has singled out India for trying to extract ‘billions and billions and billions’ of dollars in foreign aid to sign up for the Paris climate agreement. Photo: Reuters
That Trump met over three dozen foreign leaders before getting to Modi already raises questions about the new administration’s priorities as well as India’s difficulties in adjusting to the change in Washington. “New Delhi just didn’t have the chops to get to Trump via backdoor insider access, unlike the Chinese, the Taiwanese or even the Vietnamese,” says Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies. “New Delhi’s contacts here, by contrast, have been the ancien regime types who have now been excommunicated by Trump.”
