AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Days after President Trump doubled tariffs on India to 50%, the country's leader is on a plane to visit America's chief rival, China. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a regional security summit this weekend. NPR's Diaa Hadid reports from Mumbai on this shuffling of friends and foes.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: This visit was planned months ago, but it's taken on a new urgency. President Trump imposed crippling tariffs to punish India for being a major buyer of Russian oil, but he has not punished other countries that trade with Russia. Trump's people have also been browbeating Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a near-daily basis, like trade advisor Peter Navarro. He spoke to Bloomberg on Thursday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PETER NAVARRO: The road to peace runs, at least partly, right through New Delhi.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: You mean Putin's war or Modi's war?
NAVARRO: I mean Modi's war.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: OK.
HADID: This is a stunning reversal of decades of bipartisan Washington policy to pull India closer, to act as a check on a more muscular China. In the words of CNN's commentator Fareed Zakaria, it is perhaps...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FAREED ZAKARIA: The biggest strategic mistake of the Trump presidency so far.
HADID: The Trump administration, however, wants to prioritize the conflict in Ukraine and sees India as undermining those efforts. Modi is not buying it. At home, he has urged Indians to buy Indian, and pro-government outlets are projecting defiance. This is presenter Palki Sharma from Firstpost Channel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PALKI SHARMA: We may see more losses and disruption, but India is not ready to submit to Trump's conditions.
HADID: So India moving closer to China is also...
SHASHANK SINGH: To show the middle finger to Trump.
HADID: Shashank Singh is a lecturer in South Asian studies at Yale. But Singh says Modi has been weakened by tariffs and the public humiliations, and that's given China more leverage over India.
SINGH: India wants to be friends with China, but this has to happen on Chinese terms.
HADID: Singh says Modi will visit without resolving pressing grievances, including demarcating their Himalayan border that runs over 2,000 miles, despite two dozen rounds of discussion. Conflict over that border triggered deadly skirmishes five years ago, killing 24 soldiers, mostly Indian. And there's tensions over China's military supplies to Pakistan, which came to prominence in May, when Pakistan fought India to a ceasefire using Chinese fighter jets that downed Indian fighter planes. At the time, Arnab Goswami, a nationalist media commentator, summarized how many Indians felt on his TV show.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ARNAB GOSWAMI: Why does China want to fight a proxy war with India using Pakistan?
HADID: But India has had to move on. China is now...
CHIETIGJ BAJPAEE: Seen as perhaps the lesser evil to their difficult relations with the United States.
HADID: Chietigj Bajpaee is a senior research fellow for South Asia at the think tank Chatham House. He says, relations are improving between India and China to some degree, like...
BAJPAEE: Relaxing visa restrictions - direct flights will be resumed between both countries. There's been the resumption of a Hindu pilgrimage.
HADID: But China has signaled it's still the boss, despite these warming relations. Bloomberg reported that 300 Chinese engineers were pulled from iPhone plants in India. It's unclear whether Beijing requested them to leave, but it reflects a policy of discouraging companies from shifting manufacturing to other Asian countries. Washington once supported India's efforts to be a stronger manufacturing hub in Asia. Not anymore - and analysts say without America's support, India isn't just weaker. China has actually become stronger.
Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Mumbai.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
