Trump calls India a 'big abuser' in trade ties with US, says Modi will meet him

New Delhi: India is a "very big abuser" when it comes to its trade relations with the United States, former American President Donald Trump, who is seeking re-election to the Oval Office at the White House has said, adding that the South Asian nation’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi would meet him next week.

The Republican Party’s candidate for the November 5 US presidential elections was speaking at a campaign event in Flint, Michigan on Tuesday when he criticised India for imposing high tariffs on imports from the United States. He referred to the tariff barriers imposed by Brazil and China too. He also articulated his policy of responding with reciprocal tariffs on exports of India, Brazil, and China to the US.

Trump, however, also called Modi “a fantastic man”.

Modi is set to visit the United States from September 21 to 23. He will meet US President Joe Biden at Wilmington in Delaware on September 21, when they will also be joined by the Japanese and Australian prime ministers Fumio Kishida and Anthony Albanese respectively, for the fourth in-person summit of the Quad. Modi will also travel to New York to address the Indian American community on September 22 and participate in the Summit for the Future, which United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will host, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi confirmed.

“So, when India, which is a very big abuser. He (Modi) happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he's fantastic. I mean, fantastic man. A lot of these leaders are fantastic,” Trump said in Michigan.

Neither the MEA nor the Prime Minister’s Office, however, confirmed or contradicted Trump’s statement that Modi would meet him during his visit to the US. Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri may speak on the issue on Thursday when he will brief journalists about the prime minister’s visit to the US.

The government also did not clarify if the prime minister would meet US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidential elections.

If Modi meets Trump, but not Harris, who was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian American mother, it may be seen by the Democrats as a sign of New Delhi’s bias toward the Republican Party’s candidate. Trump’s campaign team is likely to use his meeting with Modi to woo the Indian American voters, the majority of whom have been traditionally voting for the Democratic Party.

“These people are the sharpest people. They're not a little bit backward... You know the expression, they're at the top of their game, and they use it against us. But India is very tough. Brazil is very tough…China is the toughest of all, but we were taking care of China with the tariffs,” Trump, who was the US president from January 2017 to January 2021, said.

“So, we're going to do a reciprocal trade. If anybody charges us 10 cents, if they charge us $2, if they charge us a hundred percent, 250 (percent), we charge them the same thing. And what's going to happen? Everything's going to disappear, and we're going to end up having free trade again. And if it doesn't disappear, we're going to take in a lot of money,” he said.

Trump had repeatedly embarrassed Modi during his term as president of the US. He had not only personally ridiculed the prime minister on the issue of high tariffs on Harley Davidson motorcycles in India, but also belittled New Delhi’s support to development projects in Afghanistan. He had scrapped the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) privilege for the exporters of India in the US.

He had even claimed that Modi had requested him to play the role of a mediator between India and Pakistan and between India and China to help resolve the dispute over Kashmir. He had kept repeating the claim despite rebuttals from New Delhi.

The two leaders, however, had put up a good show of camaraderie at the “Howdy! Modi” event in Houston in September 2019 as well as in its sequel “Namaste Trump” in Ahmedabad in February 2020.

Modi’s ‘Aab Ki Baar Trump Sarkar’ comment at the “Howdy! Modi” event had triggered a controversy as it had been perceived by many as an attempt to nudge the Indian American community to vote for Trump and give him a second term in the White House. New Delhi, however, had later clarified that its relations with Washington DC had been enjoying bipartisan support in the US and India had harboured no intention to interfere in the politics of America.

In April 2020, Trump had warned of “retaliation” if India had not allowed the export of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for Covid-19 patients in the US. Trump had kept on talking about his friendship with Modi and even claimed the support of the Indian American community ahead of the 2020 presidential elections in the US. He had alleged during his first debate with his rival Joe Biden that the Government of India had not been making public the actual number of people who had died of Covid-19 in the country. He had gone on to say during the second debate that the air had been filthy in India.