On Wednesday, Donald Trump hammered another nail in the coffin of the India-US relationship by claiming that Narendra Modi made a personal pledge to cease importing Russian oil. “He assured me there will be no oil purchased from Russia,” Trump said. “Maybe that is breaking news.” The trouble is that Modi, according to the Indian Government, never had a conversation with Trump. No matter. Trump proceeded to repeat his claim on Friday.

Is the US President trying to test India — or is his newest proclamation evidence of an unstable mind losing touch with reality? Either way, the damage inflicted by Trump on Washington’s relationship with New Delhi is staggering.

Since the late Nineties, the United States has expended considerable political and diplomatic capital courting India as a democratic counterweight to China. Befriending New Delhi, notoriously suspicious of the West, became a bipartisan endeavour in Washington. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have all treated India as an indispensable partner. The effort paid off as India — which maintained a close friendship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War — shed the suspicions inherited from the colonial era and inched closer to the West. It took Donald Trump mere months to pulverise the gains made over three decades.

His administration has repeatedly accused India of financing Vladimir Putin’s war chest by purchasing vast quantities of Russian oil. About 35% of India’s crude imports come from Russia. In August, he imposed a 50% tariff on India’s exports to the United States.

There are, as officials in Delhi point out, two problems with Trump’s claims. First, it was the United States that originally encouraged India to buy Russian crude to help stabilise prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Second, China is a bigger buyer of Russian oil but has invited no opprobrium from Trump, let alone penalties. In fact, Europe’s overall trade with Moscow is larger than India’s. It, too, has escaped any sanctions. The argument that Trump is punishing India to help Ukraine is not supported by facts. There appears to be no grand scheme behind any of this.

So what explains Trump’s actions? Wounded vanity. The Indians failed to propitiate it sufficiently, and Trump is flogging them at the expense of his own nation’s long-term interests.

In May, he claimed credit for engineering the end of a brief but brutal war between India and Pakistan. India strenuously denied that the ceasefire between the two sides had anything to do with Trump. And in a tense phone call with the American president, Modi reportedly emphasised India’s position that it regards its dispute with Pakistan as a strictly bilateral matter. This upset Trump, who proceeded to invite the head of Pakistan’s army  — an institution that, according to America’s own intelligence agencies, sponsors a small galaxy of terrorist outfits and may have harboured Osama bin Laden — for lunch at the White House. Ignoring India’s public rebuttals, Trump has since continued to brag that it was he who ended the war in South Asia, adding it to a long list of conflicts that he claims to have resolved. His boasting was complemented by petty insults on social media, where he branded India’s economy, the world’s fourth largest, “dead”.

Many businesses in India have indeed been devastated by the tariffs introduced by the country’s largest trading partner. But with its enormous domestic market, four trillion dollar economy and global reach, India is not without the means to weather this blow. Still, Modi is evidently anxious not to jeopardise the trade talks between the two sides. This explains why New Delhi has avoided directly rejecting Trump’s claims this time, instead using cautious language about protecting consumers and broadening energy sources.

In reality, as Sumit Ritolia of the data analysis firm Kpler has noted, “cutting Russian [oil] imports would be difficult, costly and risky” for India. Purchases from Russia are so “deeply embedded in India’s energy system” that “a rapid exit from Russian barrels” remains “unrealistic”. Besides, for Modi the political cost of appeasing Trump is too steep. He will instantly endanger his strongman image if he appears to capitulate to Trump.

One way out of this muddle may be increased purchases of American energy. But whatever Modi and Trump do, the trust that took 30 years to build between the US and India, now shattered, will not easily be repaired.

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Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India (Hurst)

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