The Nobel Prize and a Testy Phone Call: How the Trump-Modi Relationship Unraveled
President Trump’s repeated claims about having “solved” the India-Pakistan war infuriated Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. And that was only the beginning.
Mujib Mashal and Anupreeta Das reported from New Delhi, and Tyler Pager from Washington.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India was losing patience with President Trump.
Mr. Trump had been saying — repeatedly, publicly, exuberantly —
that he had “solved” the military conflict between India and Pakistan, a dispute that dates back more than 75 years and is far deeper and more complicated than Mr. Trump was making it out to be.
During a phone call on June 17, Mr. Trump brought it up again, saying how proud he was of ending the military escalation. He mentioned that Pakistan was going to nominate him for the
Nobel Peace Prize, an honor for which he had been openly campaigning. The not-so-subtle implication, according to people familiar with the call, was that Mr. Modi should do the same.
The Indian leader bristled.
He told Mr. Trump that U.S. involvement had nothing to do with the recent cease-fire. It had been settled directly between India and Pakistan.
Mr. Trump largely brushed off Mr. Modi’s comments, but the disagreement — and
Mr. Modi’s refusal to engage on the Nobel — has played an outsize role in the souring relationship between the two leaders, whose once-close ties go back to Mr. Trump’s first term.
The dispute has played out against the backdrop of trade talks of immense importance to India and the United States, and the fallout risks pushing India closer to American adversaries in Beijing and Moscow. Mr. Modi is expected to travel to China this weekend, where he will meet with President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people in Washington and New Delhi, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a relationship that has far-reaching implications for both sides, with Mr. Trump eroding a strategic relationship and India alienating its biggest trading partner as it tries to keep its economy afloat.
Just weeks after the June phone call, and with trade talks dragging on, Mr. Trump startled India by announcing that imports from the country would be subjected to a tariff of 25 percent. And on Wednesday, he slapped India with an additional 25 percent tariff for
buying Russian oil, adding up to a crushing 50 percent.
Mr. Modi, who once called Mr. Trump “a true friend,” was officially on the outs. After telling Mr. Modi that he would travel to India later this year for the Quad summit, Mr. Trump no longer has plans to visit in the fall, according to people familiar with the president’s schedule.
In India, Mr. Trump is now seen in some quarters as a source of national humiliation. Last week, a giant Trump effigy was paraded around a festival in the state of Maharashtra, with signs declaring him a backstabber. The blows from the United States have been so intense that one Indian official described them as “gundagardi”: straight-up bullying, or thuggery.
The two men have not spoken since the June 17 phone call.
At its core, the story of Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi is about two brash, populist leaders with big egos and authoritarian tendencies, and the web of loyalties that help keep both men in power. But it is also the tale of an American president with his eye on a Nobel Prize, running smack into the immovable third rail of Indian politics: the conflict with Pakistan.
A Political Nonstarter
Few in India expected Mr. Modi to end up in this situation.
He won his third term in office on the promise of transforming himself and his country into global players. And even if Mr. Trump was known to focus more on personal relationships and less on geopolitical strategy, the Indians thought that dynamic would work in their favor.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he attended the large “Howdy Modi!” rally of the Indian diaspora in Texas. Months later, the American president visited Mr. Modi’s home state of Gujarat for an event branded “Namaste Trump!”
In Mr. Trump’s second term, foreign leaders have found success by tending to his ego with compliments and gifts. The British prime minister arrived at the White House with a letter from King Charles. The Finnish president bonded with Mr. Trump on the golf course. Even President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, whom Mr. Trump once berated in public, showed up at the White House and thanked him in front of the cameras.
But what Mr. Trump wants most from Mr. Modi is a political nonstarter.
If Mr. Modi were to be perceived as having caved to American pressure for a cease-fire with a weaker nation, the
costs at home would be enormous. Mr. Modi’s strongman identity depends, in large part, on how tough he is on Pakistan. Acknowledging that Mr. Trump had a role, let alone nominating him for a Nobel for it, would be seen as surrender. For Pakistan, which
has found itself in Mr. Trump’s good graces recently, the decision to nominate him for the prize came quickly.
It is difficult to quantify exactly how much influence the United States had in resolving the latest outbreak of violence between India and Pakistan. Mr. Trump contends that he used trade as leverage to get the two sides to stop fighting. After these enticements and warnings, he said, “all of a sudden they said, ‘I think we will stop’” the fighting.
India denies that.
Washington does carry a lot of sway on both sides, and historically, messages from American leaders have helped quell tensions. But the fact that Mr. Modi could not find a way to even subtly acknowledge some Trump role, given the stakes, shows how explosive the issue is for him. Analysts say the extreme rigidity of the Indian response also speaks to how power over the past decade has been increasingly centralized at the service of protecting Mr. Modi’s strongman image at all costs.
“The idea that Modi would accept a cease-fire under U.S. pressure or that he needed or sought mediation — it doesn’t just go against his personality,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It goes against Indian diplomatic practice. Modi sold his relationships with U.S. presidents as an asset — strategically and politically — and now the opposition is portraying his friendship with Trump as a liability.”
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After the June call with Mr. Trump, Indian officials put out a statement saying Mr. Modi had “firmly stated that India does not and will never accept mediation” and that “President Trump listened carefully” and “expressed his support toward India’s fight against terrorism.”
The White House did not acknowledge the call, nor did Mr. Trump post about it on his social media accounts. And yet, four days after he spoke with Mr. Modi, Mr. Trump mentioned the issue again when he announced a peace deal between Congo and Rwanda.
“I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan,” Mr. Trump posted. “No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do.”
Our economics reporters — based in New York, London, Brussels, Berlin, Hong Kong and Seoul — are digging into every aspect of the tariffs causing global turmoil. They are joined by dozens of reporters writing about the effects on everyday people.
‘This Is About More Than Just Russia’
Mr. Trump says the tariffs on India are punishment for buying Russian oil and for the protectionist nature of the Indian market, a longstanding complaint for Mr. Trump and other American presidents.
The White House insists that the two men have “a respectful relationship” and “remain in close communication,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
“President Trump was able to successfully bring peace to the conflict between India and Pakistan,” she said, repeating the assertion that India had flatly denied.
But to many officials and observers, the colossal penalties on India in particular appear to be punishment for not falling in line rather than any kind of cohesive effort to reduce the trade deficit or cut off funding for Mr. Putin’s war. They point out that China, the biggest importer of Russian crude, has been spared.
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India is now
alone with Brazil, led by a president who has antagonized Mr. Trump directly, in being subject to 50 percent tariffs, higher than any other country. (Pakistan came away with 19 percent.)
Another point of tension has been the power of the anti-immigrant sentiments within Mr. Trump’s base. Indian officials believed early on that they could find common ground with the American right-wing movement but they were caught off guard by the
rift among Mr. Trump’s supporters over H-1B visas, with much of the attention directed at Indians, who make up the largest holders of such visas.
Indian students also make up one out of every four foreign students in the United States, so Mr. Trump’s crackdown on student visas took the country by surprise.
Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, has repeatedly complained to the president about the high numbers of undocumented immigrants from India, who are among those who have been rounded up and deported as part of Mr. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The method and timing of some of those deportations caused headaches for Mr. Modi and made clear Mr. Trump would not be sensitive to the political realities the Indian leader was facing.
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But at a friendly news conference during the visit that month, there were signs that the two sides could still find a way forward, with India buying billions of dollars more of American oil and gas, to assuage Mr. Trump’s grievance over the balance sheet.
“We can make up the difference very easily with the deficit,” Mr. Trump said, with Mr. Modi standing next to him.
‘Do You Believe Me or Trump?’
Then, in May, some of the worst fighting in decades erupted between India and Pakistan.
The conflict began after
26 people were killed in a terrorist attack on the Indian side of Kashmir, a contested region between the two nations, while Vice President JD Vance and his family were on a visit in India. Mr. Trump dialed up Mr. Modi to express his sympathies.
As the fighting raged, with both sides firing drones and missiles over four days, the Trump administration stepped in to lend its weight for a diplomatic solution, with the vice president and the secretary of state making calls to both sides.
Early in the evening on the fourth day of fighting, reporters were called for a news conference in New Delhi with rumors that a conditional cease-fire had been agreed to by the two sides. But just before India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, stepped up to the podium to make the announcement, Mr. Trump upstaged him by flashing an announcement of “FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE” on Truth Social.
Minutes later, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced that India and Pakistan had agreed “to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site.”
That statement in particular was galling to the Indians because it has been India’s policy for decades that the issue of Pakistan — especially in relation to Kashmir — is one for the two countries to handle alone, without third-party mediation.
A Declined Invitation to Washington
By the time Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi got on the phone in June, there might have been an opportunity to mend ties and refocus on the ongoing trade negotiations.
But that did not happen.
The call, which lasted 35 minutes, took place as Mr. Trump flew back to Washington on Air Force One after he left early from the Group of 7 industrialized countries meeting in Canada, which Mr. Modi also attended.
Mr. Modi declined an invitation from Mr. Trump to stop by Washington before he flew home. His officials were scandalized that Mr. Trump might try to force their leader into a handshake with Pakistan’s army chief, who had also been invited to the White House for lunch around the same time. It was another clear sign, a senior Indian official said, that Mr. Trump cared little for the complexity of their issue or the sensitivities and history around it.
Later on, there was talk of trying to set up another call to finalize a partial trade deal. But with the trust between the two leaders eroding, the Indians were wary of putting Mr. Modi on the phone with Mr. Trump. Indian officials were nervous that Mr. Trump would post whatever he wanted on Truth Social, regardless of what agreements were made on the call, a senior Indian official said.
Mr. Trump, frustrated by the tariff negotiations, reached out to Mr. Modi several times, according to two people briefed on the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
Mr. Modi did not respond to those requests, they said.
Ms. Kelly, the White House spokeswoman, denied that Mr. Trump had reached out.
In the final stretch before the additional 25 percent tariff kicked in on Wednesday, Mr. Trump announced he was nominating Sergio Gor, a close adviser, to serve as ambassador to India, with the additional charge of special envoy for the region. (Indian officials were torn over how to read the nomination — Mr. Gor was close to Mr. Trump, yes, but they were offended that the “regional” envoy designation lumped India in with Pakistan.)
In the hours before the deadline, officials from the United States and India held a virtual meeting, discussing a range of issues from trade to defense cooperation.
But not only have the additional tariffs gone into effect as announced, Mr. Trump’s advisers have continued railing against India. One called India’s approach to trade negotiations “arrogant” and another went as far as calling the conflict in Ukraine “Modi’s war.”
Now, Mr. Modi, in public at least, appears to be moving on from talk of trade negotiations. Instead, he is talking about “self-reliance” and reviving his decade-old “Make in India” campaign as he continues to play to his home base.
And during this weekend’s trip to China — Mr. Modi’s first in seven years — he is expected to have a receptive audience for stronger and expanded ties with Beijing and Moscow.
