After a Last Visit from Biden’s Team, India Readies Itself for Trump

The Washington Post / Karishma Mehrotra

12:45 JST, January 7, 2025

NEW DELHI – On Monday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan announced in New Delhi a last hurrah for a bilateral relationship that he has personally worked hard to cement.

“The United States is now finalizing the necessary steps to remove long-standing regulations that have prevented civil nuclear cooperation between India’s leading nuclear entities and U.S. companies,” he said.

Sullivan’s trip – which he said was probably his last overseas one in his current role – marked the close of one chapter of the U.S.-Indian relationship and the start of a new one with the Trump administration that India is viewing with optimism, apart from some obvious friction points, such as trade and immigration.

“I know, today, a lot of countries are nervous about the U.S.,” Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar told reporters shortly after the election. “Let’s be honest about it: We are not one of them.”

The fact that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President-elect Donald Trump are “ideological bedfellows” is bound to help, said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute. They share a high-profile bond and a disdain for Islamist terrorism, the media and criticism over democratic backsliding.

At the same time, said Ashley Tellis, a former State Department and National Security Council official and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, there are real differences in relations that will come up. “Both sides often exaggerate the extent of their strategic convergence in an effort to obscure the differences.”

Here are the areas that the United States and India are expected to focus on during the second Trump administration.

‘Most protectionist country’

The United States is India’s largest trade partner, with an annual trade valued at $190 billion. Importantly, India exports far more to the United States than it imports into its heavily protected economy, with a $45 billion deficit in its favor.

“In Trump’s mind, India is the tariff king,” said C. Raja Mohan, director of the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. “It’s locked in his brain.”

Trump’s stump speeches have repeatedly denounced India’s protectionism and fixated on tariffs against particular products, such as Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

In 2019, Trump revoked special trade privileges to India abruptly, said Lisa Curtis, former National Security Council senior director for South and Central Asia from 2017 to 2021. Curtis, who is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the move came from the “influence” of U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer, who in a 2023 book called India “the most protectionist country.”

Ajay Srivastava, a former foreign trade director in India’s Commerce Ministry who helped formulate the response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum at the time, said he expects India will counter any new tariffs in “equal measure,” raising the specter of a trade war.

More importantly, though, he said, India has not been able to fully take advantage of the United States’ push to diversify supply chains away from China, even with new Apple manufacturing plants in India. A combination of burdensome regulations, tax policies and a lack of ease of doing business have kept U.S. investment below what it could be.

While India will be especially attentive to the new administration’s emphasis on the technology partnership between the two countries, some analysts say India should be prepared for asks related to Elon Musk’s Tesla and Starlink, which have not yet taken off in the country.

Unsealed indictments

The Justice Department has recently unsealed two major indictments involving India. In 2023, one accused an Indian government official of a murder-for-hire plot on U.S. soil of an American citizen who is a Sikh separatist. In 2024, the other hit Indian billionaire Gautam Adani with fraud-related charges.

India hopes the Trump administration will do what it can to soften the blows in both, according to analysts. Perhaps with that in mind, Adani promised to invest $10 billion in the United States after Trump’s win.

As some Sikhs in the United States continue to call for a separate state, New Delhi has repeatedly argued that the United States has not done enough to clamp down, while Washington has been torn on pushing for higher accountability, unsure of whether India would try such an act again.

A drone delivery to India was held up in the Senate in February because of these concerns.

Consensus on China

India and the United States see China as their long-term strategic adversary – a convergence that in recent years has convinced both Democrats and Republicans to seek closer ties.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) – Trump’s choice for secretary of state – in July introduced legislation that pushed for stronger defense ties with New Delhi in the context of China. Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser pick, as a House member in 2021 called for a formal alliance and trade deal with India to counter China.

This year, India is slated to host a multilateral engagement meeting with Australia, Japan and the United States, known as the Quad, which Trump revived in his first term as a buttress against China.

If Trump’s national security apparatus continues prioritizing the threat from China, not only will India continue being the “answer to the China problem,” said Mohan of the National University of Singapore, but it may also force China to “recalculate and be a little nicer to its neighbors.”

Many in India speculate that an agreement between India and China on patrolling their shared border – reached in October, four years after bloody clashes between the nations’ border guards tanked bilateral relations – came about because of China’s anticipation of a Trump win.

Some experts in India, however, worry that Trump could try to improve his relationship with the Chinese, especially under the influence of Musk and other interests seeking better U.S.-Chinese business ties. Trump has invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his inauguration, while he hasn’t invited Modi.

“It is not clear that Trump has, or will pursue, a coherent anti-China strategy that sensibly incorporates India,” said Tellis of Carnegie.

Immigration

Indians make up the largest group of unauthorized migrants in the United States outside of Latin Americans, ranking third in 2021 – a prime target for the deportations that Trump has vowed as part of his hard-line anti-immigration agenda.

New Delhi hopes American business interests will protect the coveted H-1B visa program for high-skilled migrants. In December, Musk publicly supported the program, unleashing a fight with far-right activists, and Trump eventually sided with Musk.

The Bangladesh theory

One of the most destabilizing events of the past year for India was the fall of Sheikh Hasina, a Bangladeshi prime minister India saw as crucial to the country’s interests and security.

While on the surface this should have little to do with U.S.-Indian relations, Tellis said that the “widespread” and “fictitious” theory “including in official circles” in India that Americans had a hand in the revolution “is a good example of the still persistent differences” between the two.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party publicly blamed the U.S. State Department and the “deep state” for conspiring against India, in a veiled response to both the indictments and the events in Bangladesh.

The public condemnation is yet another example of the BJP’s “hardball approach on foreign policy issues,” Curtis said. “Perhaps the Biden administration could have done more to message its policy on Bangladesh, but it is also incumbent on the Indian government to rein in this narrative.”

In a move that would please the BJP, Trump in October posted on X that he condemned the “barbaric violence” against Hindus in Bangladesh.