India’s public obsession with Donald Trump’s victorious return to the White House has largely ignored the formidable challenges that New Delhi will face on Capitol Hill from January next year. A longstanding bipartisan consensus on India is likely to fray unless South Block—the seat of the prime minister’s office and the ministries of external affairs and defence—redoubles efforts to woo members of both chambers of the incoming US Congress.
Trump’s instinct may be to remain friendly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Modi will want to return the 47th US president’s goodwill. But any smooth passage of such intentions can only be fruitful if both South Block and the White House vigorously court senators and members of the House of Representatives. Just because the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian-Americans is the biggest country-focused caucus on Capitol Hill, it would be a fatal error to take it for granted. This also applies to the Senate India Caucus, which has the distinction of having been the first country-specific caucus in the history of the Senate.
Those who assume that merely because Trump has won the election, India’s relations with the US will be better than it was with the Joe Biden administration are indulging in sheer fantasy. Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), such as its chair Pramila Jayapal and its most outspoken member Ilhan Omar, have been overwhelmingly re-elected to the House. Both these Congresswomen and many CPC members—estimated as of now to comprise about 100 legislators in the new House—feel that India has enjoyed a free pass on Capitol Hill for two decades. They are not going to change their minds.
There is also the ‘Squad’ within the CPC, who are the Democratic equivalent of the extreme ‘Tea Party’ among Republicans. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Squad is anti-India, at least anti-Modi and anti-Jaishankar. Its most vocal members are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman and three more. They make up for their lack of numbers with their lung power.
The New York Times and the rest of the liberal-but-influential American media will not stop their scrutiny of the Modi government on various issues. They will not let go of the freshest fodder for their investigations—any misstep by India’s financial regulators regarding the Adani Group. Or for that matter, the pursuit of the Gurpatwant Singh Pannun case. There is little that Trump can do in altering the course of US law in such matters, even if he wants to.
India may end up paying a price it cannot afford to successfully navigate the new complexities in American politics. These will come into play once Trump begins governing in January and Democrats in both Houses of Congress fight back like the proverbial wounded tiger. India could suffer collateral damage from the deep polarisation in US politics and American society. It had avoided such damage during the last two decades when divisions in American polity were deepening.
South Asia experts in the US have already begun speculating about this Shylockian pound of flesh that New Delhi will have to pay to continue to claim that it is a “natural ally” of Washington. India-US relations are certain to go back to being transactional. There will no more be much traction to be gained from proclamations that India and America are both democracies, sharing the rule of law, united by a common working language and similar smugness.
It has never been sufficiently acknowledged either among India’s chattering classes or among those outside the government who have any interest in the US that the success of this vast bilateral relationship is greatly owed to plodding work by young Indian diplomats on Capitol Hill for nearly three decades. That work is now under challenge for a variety of reasons. If there is no perestroika—to borrow the Russian term meaning restructuring, immortalised by Mikhail Gorbachev—in India’s dealings with the new US Congress, much of the past work in this area will unravel.
As freshmen legislators—especially House members—prepare to move to Washington, it is becoming increasingly clear that the incoming 119th Congress will be primarily preoccupied with domestic issues. Barring the Ukraine conflict and the war in West Asia, plus climate change to a lesser degree, external affairs will not be of much concern to the new Congress.
This is to India’s disadvantage. Whether it has been the Kargil war or the India-US nuclear deal, India had always used pressure from Capitol Hill to overcome resistance in successive administrations to accept South Block’s point of view or accommodate its vital interests. The state, defence and commerce departments continue to be India-unfriendly. Scratch their surface and deep suspicions about India’s intentions and ambitions immediately come up.
Officers in the US Army at all levels are still more comfortable having a drink with West Point-trained, whiskey-imbibing Pakistani counterparts than with Indian officers who are viewed in the Pentagon as stuck-up, dogmatic and resistant to their overtures.
Under these circumstances, if the focus excessively shifts to domestic matters in the 119th Congress, India may find itself at the mercy of the Trump administration’s notoriously familiar transactional demands. Some of these demands may not have anything to do with India, but there will be collateral damage from, say, a global trade war, demolition of the World Trade Organization or a White House decision to withdraw again from the historic Paris climate accord.
It is not a good augury that senators—of both parties—have tasted blood over Trump’s cabinet nominees even before they have assembled in Washington on January 3 in their new avatar. Attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz’s forced withdrawal from confirmation hearings was mostly extracted under duress by Republican senators. This has defied the expectation that the new Republican-controlled Senate will be Trump’s doormat. On the contrary, this great—even if often archaic—American institution will fight to protect its powers, with members cooperating across the aisle.
The distinct possibility that more of Trump’s cabinet nominees will be blocked has given a term fresh currency in the Senate lexicon: resistance. Palestinian American House member Tlaib might prefer the term intifada.
(Views are personal)
(kpnayar@gmail.com)
K P Nayar | Strategic analyst