New Delhi: Former US President Donald Trump is meeting Prime Minister Modi next week, reports the Washington Post. He mentioned it while speaking at a campaign event in Michigan—the Indian embassy in Washington had nothing to say on the matter.
Modi is scheduled to visit the United States this weekend, for a Quad summit with Australia, Japan, and the US. It’ll be hosted by outgoing President Joe Biden at his hometown in Wilmington, Delaware.
“The popular and polarizing Indian prime minister has advanced Hindu nationalism in his decade-long tenure,” writes the Post in its report. And that’s all they have to say on Modi.
Trump, though, reportedly had a lot more to say: “He’s fantastic. I mean, fantastic, man. A lot of these leaders are fantastic,” he said at the event in Michigan. “A lot of these leaders are fantastic … They’re not a little bit backward. You know the expression, they’re at the top of their game and they use it against us. But India is very tough, Brazil is very tough. I can tell you, everyone.”
Foreign leaders have previously defended meeting the beleaguered former president Trump over the past four years as standard operating protocol when it comes to meeting with the opposition. But Trump and Modi have enjoyed a fairly friendly relationship. During Trump’s 2020 visit to India, Modi received him in style in Ahmedabad with ‘Namaste Trump’. It was a role reversal of the massive ‘Howdy Modi’ rally held in Houston, Texas, in 2019.
While the details of this meeting are yet to be revealed, it’s clear that it won’t have the same fanfare.
The South China Morning Post says that India and China are finally showing signs of de-escalation after years of heightened border tensions. Recent diplomatic talks offer a “hopeful glimpse into improved economic ties and future cooperation,” it claims.
Last week’s meeting in St. Petersburg between National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also yielded “positive progress”—the MEA noted that the meeting was a “platform to review efforts toward resolving outstanding issues along the Line of Actual Control”. Jaishankar, too, announced at a Geneva Centre for Security Policy talk that roughly 75 percent of India’s “disengagement problems” with China have been resolved.
The next “positive signal of recalibration” in India and China’s relationship is a scheduled meeting between Modi and Xi Jinping at next month’s BRICS summit in Kazan.
But it’s not just brewing border issues that have been brought under control. Economic ties stand to benefit too: India might ease restrictions on Chinese investments in sectors like solar panels and battery manufacturing to boost domestic production. This means that Chinese multinationals will finally have a foot in the door to the Indian investment landscape.
And that’s something that India could stand to benefit from, according to Mihir Sharma in Bloomberg.
“Aiming for self-reliance is a fool’s errand,” he writes in a column headlined “India has chip dreams. What it needs is a strategy”.
“Is the goal to increase the amount of value added in India? Or to create jobs? Is the government’s primary concern reducing India’s dependence on China, or substituting imports overall? Do officials think domestic production is essential to support the creation of a broader electronics sector, or to provide supply-chain resilience to the growing automobile sector?” he questions.
The Indian government’s latest annual economic survey from July suggests that prioritising FDI from China to bolster exports and manage the trade deficit would be a good idea—but owing to overall geopolitical concerns, the Indian government would prefer Chinese investment in “non-sensitive” sectors, like solar panels and batteries.
When it comes to chip imports, reducing China’s share in India might make sense—but semiconductors is not an area to skimp on, according to Sharma. “Instead, the focus should be on identifying the spots in the supply chain where India can enter quickly and scale up effectively. Fabrication is glamorous, but as multiple countries across the world have discovered, the start-up costs can be ruinous,” he writes.