Roving Periscope: Now, Rubio claims the US was “involved directly” in ending Indo-Pak war!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Despite India asserting that it will not compromise on its national interests under any circumstances, US President Donald Trump hopes to get New Delhi sign on his dotted tariff lines by applying pressure tactics—saying no negotiations with India until the tariff issue is resolved.
Using ‘pressure points,’ he muddied waters ahead of the scheduled visit of the US trade negotiators to New Delhi on August 25. His Friday statement is being viewed as another tactic to pressurize India to stop buying oil and defence goods from Russia. Earlier, he said that merely reducing tariffs on American imports would not be enough, and India must stop buying Russian oil as well.
India is still banking on the next round of bilateral trade agreement (BTA) negotiations, beginning August 25, to persuade the US to roll back the 50 percent tariffs imposed unilaterally on its goods.
Trump announced 25 percent reciprocal tariffs on India on August 1, higher than many competing countries, which became effective on August 7. On Wednesday, he imposed an additional 25 percent tariff on India for buying oil and arms from Russia, which would become applicable from August 27.
Meanwhile, the media reported, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while claiming that Trump is a “President of Peace,” said when India and Pakistan went to war (in May), “We got involved directly, and the President was able to deliver in that peace between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.”
Since May 10, Trump has repeated his claim some three dozen times that he “helped settle” the tensions between India and Pakistan and told them that America will do a “lot of trade” with them if they stopped the conflict.
India has consistently maintained that its Operation Sindoor has merely been paused at the direct request of a panicked Pakistan Army’s Director-General of Military Operation (DGMO) to his Indian counterpart to halt cross-border firing. It was not a ‘ceasefire’ (as Trump claimed) but a pause and the operation could be resumed if Pakistan-sponsored terrorists attacked again as they did on April 22 in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, massacring 26 Hindu-only tourists.
Rubio, in an interview to EWTN’s The World Over on Thursday, said that Trump is committed to peace and being the “President of Peace.”
“And so, we saw when India and Pakistan went to war, we got involved directly, and the President was able to deliver on that peace,” Rubio said.
He also listed other conflicts that he said Trump helped resolve. “Cambodia and Thailand more recently; Azerbaijan and Armenia, hopefully…DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo)-Rwanda – a 30-year war, 7 million people killed – we were able to bring them here to sign it,” Rubio said.
The US was proud of those initiatives and “we’re looking for more – obviously, the big one being in Ukraine and Russia. We dedicate a significant amount of time to stopping and ending wars,” Rubio said.
The India-US negotiations for a bilateral trade agreement (BTA) have faced turbulence as the two sides could not agree on the issues of agriculture, dairy and genetically-modified (GM) products, that New Delhi wants to guard at all costs. India is unwilling to allow import of soybean and corn from the US, as these are mostly of the GM variety, and it is also not ready to give market access in dairy and sensitive agriculture items.
“The interests of our farmers are our topmost priority. India will never compromise the interests of its farmers, its cattle-rearers, and fisherfolk,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared on Thursday at an event in New Delhi, without directly referring to the US President’s tariff threats.
India’s exports of labour-intensive products to the US, such as textiles, gems and jewellery and leather goods, may take a hit with the imposition of cumulative tariffs of 50 percent. Its competitors, including those from South and Southeast Asia, are facing much lower US tariffs of 19-20 percent.
India is now working on a multi-pronged strategy to deal with the situation which includes offering support to exporters hurt by the duties through the export promotion mission, helping in export diversification and creating more demand for exporters domestically by encouraging import substitution.
With the US imposing 50 percent tariff on Indian imports, about 55 percent of India’s exports of about USD 86.5 billion to America could be hit this year.
