New Delhi, India – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Washington late on Wednesday night and is scheduled to meet United States President Donald Trump on Thursday at the White House.
While the two leaders have often described each other as friends in the past, and have even held joint political rallies together, Modi’s visit comes at a time when the relationship is being tested by Trump’s tariff threats and deportation realities.
“I look forward to meeting my friend, President Trump,” Modi said in a departing message, adding that he has a “very warm recollection of working together in [Trump’s] first term”.
Trump had announced Modi’s visit to the US after their telephone conversation on January 27, a week after he was sworn into office for his second term. After their call, Trump also said that he believed Modi would do “what is right” on undocumented Indian migrants in the US.
But pleasing both Trump and the Indian public won’t be easy for Modi.
Here’s what’s at stake for India, and what Modi might bring with him to the meeting with Trump to try to placate the US president.
What’s at stake for India?
The US is India’s largest export destination and ranks among its top two trade partners in several sectors, including technology, trade, defence and energy. The two-way trade between the US and India touched an all-time high of $118bn in 2023-24.
Bilateral ties have also strengthened in the last three decades as the US has increasingly focused on countering the rise of a shared rival – China.
But despite that convergence, Trump has made clear – as he had with several US allies – that he has deep differences too with India.
During his campaign for the 2024 election, Trump labelled India a “very big abuser” of trade and threatened tariffs. Since being elected, he pushed New Delhi to buy more US-made security equipment as a way to reduce the imbalance in their trade. In 2024, the trade surplus stood at $45.6bn, in favour of India, according to US government data.
Trump’s re-election campaign also highlighted undocumented immigration and illegal settlement in the US. As of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, among countries with the largest number of undocumented immigrants – 725,000 – living in the country.
And on Wednesday last week, a US military plane touched down in Amritsar, a city in northern India, carrying 104 Indian deportees, their hands and legs cuffed. In the farthest such journey undertaken by a US military aircraft, the “mistreatment” of deportees prompted a major outrage, including protests by the opposition, in India.
“India has always celebrated the success of Indians in the US, which means Indian Americans have been a very visible community in India’s consciousness,” said Swaran Singh, professor at the centre of international politics at Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University. Indian foreign policy too, under Modi, has especially celebrated nonresident Indians, he said. “These dynamics make the mistreatment of Indian deportees a volatile and inflammable issue in bilateral ties,” Singh said.
Jon Danilowicz, a retired diplomat who served at the US Department of State, said that Modi’s meeting with Trump “is mainly an opportunity for the Indian PM to present his side of the story to make New Delhi’s case”.
But what could Modi offer to manage the Trump threat on tariffs and deportation?
What’s Modi’s likely game plan on deportation?
Singh noted the Indian government’s muted official reaction to the outrage over images of citizens returning from the US in cuffs.
That, he suggested, was a deliberate decision.
“Trump has some method in his madness. He uses whimsical statements to create maximum pressure,” said Singh. “It is not a good sense to then publicly confront him [on contentious issues].”
Instead, after an uproar in the parliament, India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, said that the use of restraints was part of the US’s deportation policy, adding that “it is the obligation of all countries to take back their nationals if they are found to be living illegally abroad”.
“Our focus should be on a strong crackdown on the illegal migration industry while taking steps to ease visas for legitimate travellers,” said Jaishankar.
How might Modi counter Trump on tariffs?
Trump has promised to announce further tariffs later this week, and though he hasn’t specified which countries or sectors might be targeted, India is expected to be affected.
On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said that she expected these reciprocal tariffs – against countries that Trump believes impose unfair restrictions on US imports – to be announced before the US president meets Modi.
Trump has already imposed a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese imports on top of existing tariffs and has introduced a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminium imports.
But when Modi meets Trump, the Indian PM could point to recent unilateral steps that India has taken to lower the barriers to entry for US goods, say analysts.
Traditionally, India, an emerging economy, has had high tariffs in place for several imported products that it feared could hurt its domestic industry and farm sector. However, in its latest budget, announced on February 1, the Modi government slashed tariffs and avoided any protectionist announcements.
Such steps might “preempt some action of the US administration”, said Danilowicz.
India, after all, is familiar with the risks of a tariff war with the US. In 2018, Trump had imposed tariffs of 25 percent on $761m of steel and 10 percent on $382m of aluminium imported from India, which retaliated by adding customs duties to at least 28 US products. After years of trade tensions, in 2023, a resolution was announced during a Modi visit to Washington.
Modi will want to avoid a repeat.
“India has so far escaped the direct tariff heat by the new Trump administration and that is a positive sign,” said Biswajit Dhar, a distinguished professor at the Council for Social Development in New Delhi.
Dhar, an international trade expert, told Al Jazeera that Modi needs to use this meeting “to convince Trump that India plays a fair game vis-a-vis trade and, therefore, India should be treated differently.”
“If China is slapped with these kinds of tariffs, then the same thing should not happen to India,” Dhar said, adding that the “personalised background” to the duo’s relationship should allow space to accommodate these discussions. “At the least, India would not like itself to be clubbed along with China.”
After all, China – or rather the shared suspicion of Beijing’s plans for the Asia Pacific region – is the biggest glue that holds the India-US relationship together.
‘Commitment to QUAD’
Modi is only the fourth world leader to meet Trump since his re-election, after conflict-engaged Israel, Jordan and Japan, its ally in the Asia Pacific. Foreign policy experts told Al Jazeera that being invited this early in Trump’s term shows how important the US president considers ties with India.
China is a big part of that.
A day after Trump was sworn in as the 47th US president, his newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, held a meeting with fellow foreign ministers of India, Australia and Japan. The four nations – with a collective population of nearly two billion people and representing more than a third of global gross domestic produce (GDP) – form the Quad, a strategic forum focused on the Asia Pacific region.
The Modi-Trump phone call on January 27 also “emphasized their commitment to advance the US-India strategic partnership and the Indo-Pacific Quad partnership”, a US government statement after their conversation said.
“The Trump administration has clearly signalled that the Indo-Pacific region is a priority. And that’s clearly driven by the competition with China,” said Danilowicz, the former US diplomat.
But there’s another country that Trump and the US want to target – and there, New Delhi and Washington differ.
The Iran equation
A major storm is brewing between India and the US over Iran, said Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington, DC-based think tank.
At the centre of tensions is the port of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman, where India has made a multimillion-dollar investment in the hopes of developing a strategically located maritime facility. The port allows India to send food, aid and other commodities to landlocked Afghanistan and Central Asia via Iran, bypassing Pakistan, New Delhi’s archrival.
India had secured a sanctions waiver from the US during the first Trump administration for work related to Chabahar.
But in a national security presidential memorandum that Trump signed on February 4, he asked US Secretary of State Rubio to “modify or rescind sanctions waivers, particularly those that provide Iran any degree of economic or financial relief, including those related to Iran’s Chabahar port project”.
“Trump’s Iran policy could well become a flashpoint in the US-India relationship and can have a deleterious impact,” Kugelman told Al Jazeera, adding that Trump’s “maximalist position towards Iran” presents a delicate diplomatic situation for India.
‘Bonhomie’ and friction
Other niggles in ties – like allegations by US prosecutors that India’s spy agency attempted to assassinate an American citizen, Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun; or the US indictment of billionaire Gautam Adani over bribery charges – will continue to shadow bilateral ties, noted Kugelman.
“These issues will not necessarily come up in the immediate future, or at this meeting, but they are not going away anytime soon,” said Kugelman. “Given Trump’s maximalist position on tariffs, he’s going to try to do everything to incentivise countries to bring down and reduce tariffs.”
Indian diplomats and international foreign policy experts have said Modi’s celebrated ‘bromance’ equation with Trump provides India an edge on the table with other countries.
However, it does not necessarily translate into “a better deal”, said Danilowicz, the former US diplomat.
“A good equation can get India a quicker meeting or face time with Trump, not a deal,” he said, adding that New Delhi needs to prepare to deal with frictions. “It would be a mistake for India, or any country, to put too much emphasis on a personal relationship with Trump and neglect that there are many other inputs into the US foreign policy-making process, including the Congress.”
