“India buys most of its oil and military products from Russia, very little from the U.S.,” President Donald Trump said. File
| Photo Credit: AP
U.S. President Donald Trump claimed on Monday that India had offered to reduce tariffs to zero, suggesting the alleged offer had come very late, as he described the India-U.S. relationship as a “one-sided disaster”.
Mr. Trump’s post on Truth Social, a social media site, came hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the fringes of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China.
“They [India] have now offered to cut their Tariffs to nothing, but it’s getting late. They should have done so years ago,” Mr. Trump wrote.
“Until now a totally one sided relationship, and it has been for many decades. The reason is that India has charged us, until now, such high Tariffs, the most of any country, that our businesses are unable to sell into India. It has been a totally one sided disaster,” he wrote. Mr. Trump also said that India bought most of its oil and military equipment from Russia, and very little from the U.S.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi’s apparent bonhomie — evident in the first Trump administration — has unraveled in recent weeks, over an extraordinary 50% default tariff rate applied to Indian exports to the U.S. and the inability of India and the U.S. to reach a trade deal. The tariff includes a 25% levy applied to India for its arms and energy trade with Russia.
Just earlier in the day, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi had portrayed the U.S.-India relationship in optimistic terms. In a post on X, the Embassy had said that the relationship continued to “reach new heights”. It quoted U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio praising the people-to-people ties as crucial to taking the India-U.S. relationship forward.
What few people understand is that we do very little business with India, but they do a tremendous amount of business with us. In other words, they sell us massive amounts of goods, their biggest “client,” but we sell them very little – Until now a totally one sided relationship,…
— Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) September 1, 2025
Brahmins profiteering: Navarro
White House adviser Peter Navarro told Fox News in a Sunday interview that India was a “laundromat for the Kremlin”.
“Modi is a great leader. I don’t understand why he’s getting to bed with Putin and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping when he’s [sic] the biggest democracy in the world,” Mr. Navarro said.
“So I would just simply say, the Indian people, please understand what’s going on here. You got Brahmins profiteering at the expense of the Indian people,” he added. It is unclear whether Mr. Navarro was using the term “Brahmins” literally or as a reference to elites.
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Published – September 01, 2025 07:30 pm IST