Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads to a dramatically different and somewhat unstable United States this week for a meeting with the newly elected President Donald Trump. He will be among the few leaders to have a direct meeting in the White House within a month of Trump taking office for a second term. It’s too early to say if meeting Trump in the first flush of his disruptive presidency will work as an opportunity for India or not. A proactive step on India’s part amid wild turns in US policy can be a positive. It can help India gauge the mood and explore opportunities in the changed circumstances. 

Dealing with a deal maker

But there are also downsides going into discussions this early, when limits are being tested, and long-standing structures are being torn apart. Without any meaningful challenge yet from institutions and sans any guardrails of the 237-year-old US constitution, Trump plays by his own rules. Some of these are simplistic ideas he set out in the book ‘Art of the Deal’ – a cocky real-estate developer’s manual stretched thin to apply to other fields, and to life itself.

Chapter 2 of the vintage 1997 book, republished in a mass market edition in 2005, is titled “Trump Cards: The Elements of the Deal” and it begins thus: “My style of deal making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes, I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”

There is no doubt that Trump will push India on multiple fronts, that he will have many levers to use in the process and that he will deploy the bulldozer to get Modi to sign up on deals that may be of questionable value for India. American foreign policy has always been about American interests, marked by short- termism and an instrumentality that has many of its claims to principles of openness, democracy or peace sound hollow. Now, the mask is off, the pretense of values is gone, and naked power play is at work.

Need for national consensus

India will hopefully go prepared for these sets of meetings like never before, expecting to be pushed and ready with its own list of asks and redlines and non-negotiables. In short, the Trump playbook will have to be used against Trump. Modi, and India, would be helped in this if the nation had a foreign policy approach that all parties could sign up, own up and profess as the agreed Indian consensus cutting across political divides. The BJP needs the Congress and other parties on its side to make a set of strong, clear and specific demands on Trump.

Doing so with one voice requires the government of the day reaching out, establishing bonds across the aisle and coming together at least on this national task. But with Indian foreign policy itself marked by egoism, the so-called self-proclaimed march of the ‘vishwa guru’ (world leader), blindsided by its own version of performative behaviour, this opportunity appears unavailable.  A bipartisan consensus would greatly strengthen India’s negotiation with the US. But political bitterness has been brought even to foreign affairs, the bureaucrat-turned-foreign minister S Jaishankar personally feeding into some of it with barbs against opposition leaders that apparently secure his position in the BJP and with the Prime Minister at the cost of bipartisan support. 

Shocking treatment of Indians

Without this forced injection of bitterness into foreign affairs, it should not have been difficult to have an all-party consensus to formally and publicly condemn the way the Trump administration has begun the process of deportation of unauthorised Indians in the US. The use of a military plane, with Indian citizens under deportation orders set in chains, and the act duly promoted in a video by the US agencies, is unwarranted, in poor taste and tries to showcase a negative image of India at the cost of dignity and rights of Indian citizens. It is shocking that Indians are being treated no different from migrants who have been called “high threat criminal illegal aliens” like some Venezuelan gang members who have been deported to the notorious US-run Guantanamo Bay prison camps in Cuba.

Stories emerging from those who were returned on the first military flight back to the safety of India tell us about the hazards faced by ordinary poor fellow citizens, many of them from Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat, as they took enormous risks to their personal wellbeing to look for a better life in a foreign land. These Indians need our support, help and rehabilitation, particularly to recoup losses in time and money spent in their attempt to escape poverty and lack of opportunities in India.

India should condemn the US for treating Indians thus. Instead, the foreign minister has been quoted as saying that this is normal procedure for the US. “The standard operating procedure for deportation by aircraft used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the US), that is effective from 2012, I repeat to you, these are procedures in place from 2012, provides for the use of restraints,” he said. How does this help at all?  Is Jaishankar, the foreign minister of a “vishwa guru” nation not ashamed at this treatment of ordinary Indians?

The planned deportation of 20,000 Indians from the US will require an endless stream of flights, if all of them are to be sent back, not to speak of more who are being caught as raids by US immigration continue. None of them should be allowed to be detained without access to lawyers, medical aid and humane conditions in the facilities they are kept. None of them should be allowed to be sent back in chains.

This is not to speak of other issues on which Trump will push, like the demand that India buy military hardware at full American prices, or cut import tariffs even though Indian trade surpluses are not huge or perform other acts that can well imperil partnerships and long term ties with other nations – all to serve American interests. It is good to play along, to feed the ego but it is important to draw a clear line beyond which India will not give in. Modi must not bow before Trump.

(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR, Mumbai. Views expressed are personal. By special arrangement with The Billion Press)