TOI Correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump has added a $21million question to his relentless smackdown on tariffs by India despite talking up ties with New Delhi and friendship with Prime Minister Modi during the latter’s recent visit to Washington DC.
“Why are we giving $21million to India? They have a lot more money,” Trump said on Tuesday, referring to a USAID program that details the minuscule amount (0.04 per cent of USAID’s $44billon budget), ostensibly to increase voter turnout in India.
India generally has better turnout in elections than the US, and while there were social media jokes about the USAID spending the money to learn how to increase voter turnout in US, Trump did not find it amusing.
“I have a lot of respect for India and their Prime Minister, but giving $21 million for voter turnout? In India? What about voter turnout here?” Trump bristled in criticism directed more at the Biden-era US Agency for International Development (USAID) — which the President’s Department of Government Efficiency has gutted almost entirely — than at India.
He then segued into his customary rant about New Delhi’s trade barriers and tariffs, picking up the theme in a joint interview on Fox News with Elon Musk, complaining that “every country in the world takes advantage of us, and they do it with tariffs.”
“It is impossible to sell a car, practically, in, as an example, India. The tariffs are like 100 percent import duty.” Trump said, adding, “Now, if he (Musk) built the factory in India, that’s okay, but that’s unfair to us. It’s very unfair.”
Musk, seated with Trump backed his claim of 100 per cent tariff, although Tesla has already begun hiring people and buying floor space for show rooms in India in anticipation of lowered duties that will enable it to competitively sell its cars, amid prospects of future production.
Trump’s fixation with New Delhi’s tariffs and trade surplus comes despite India barely making the top 10 nations with trade surplus with the US. China has a trade surplus of almost $ 300 billion with the US, accounting for nearly a quarter of the overall $ 1.2 trillion US trade deficit, and six times India’s $45 billion.
But the US President obsessively invokes India and puts it in the same bracket despite Washington projecting New Delhi as a strategic counterweight to Beijing.
So overwrought is Trump about New Delhi and its tariffs that he inflated India’s trade surplus to $ 100 billion during Modi’s recent visit to the White House, an exaggeration the Indian side chose to ignore even as they tried to dial down differences on the issue.
