Trump and Modi: the end of a beautiful friendship?

"The bear hugs have gone. The smiles have curled into sneers." The former friendship between Donald Trump and Indian PM Narendra Modi has descended into acrimony, said Amrit Dhillon and George Grylls in The Times.

India has been left reeling by Trump's decision to hit it with 50% tariffs. It's the penalty for Modi's refusal to cease buying Vladimir Putin's oil. Only a few months ago, Trump called Modi a "true friend", and Modi even breached protocol to urge the Indian diaspora in the US to vote for Trump during his second presidential campaign. Now the "easy badinage" between the two has been replaced with insults (Trump claimed that Modi doesn't care "how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine").

In the face of Trump's fury, the appeasement lobby in Delhi has gone into overdrive, said Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express (Noida). They argue that to protect the Modi/Trump partnership, we'll just have to accede to Trump's demands. They want us, in effect, to submit to a new form of "imperialism". How else, after all, would you describe the behaviour of a power that seeks to subjugate other nations and "treats its long-standing allies like pieces of dirt"?

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Trump is being completely hypocritical, said Saroj Chadha in The Times of India (Mumbai). He may now talk tough on Putin, yet the US continues to import billions of dollars of fertilisers and nuclear material from Russia. If the aim is to rob the Kremlin of its energy revenues, why hasn't he slapped extra tariffs on the EU, which continues to buy substantial amounts of oil and gas from Russia?

Trump's volley isn't about Ukraine, said The Indian Express. What's really made him furious is Modi's refusal to open up India's dairy and agricultural sectors to US companies, so he's resorted to insults, among other things calling India a "dead economy". He needs to get with the times, said Shishir Priyadarshi and Bidisha Bhattacharya in The Print (New Delhi). We are now a "politically self-assured power" with one of the fastest growth rates of all large economies. We used to be "pressured into alignment"; now we push back. "This doesn't mean the partnership is dead. But it is not unconditional."

Even so, this spat has to be one of the Modi government's biggest foreign policy indictments, said Roshan Kishore in the Hindustan Times (New Delhi). He and his right-wing pals, won over by Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric (which plays so well within Modi's Hindu nationalist project), waxed lyrical about how good Trump was for India. None of them seem to realise that Trump doesn't give a hoot about India's interests, only his own.

Personal relationships mean nothing to this transactional president, only "hard material realities". And the key material reality is that India stands to lose a lot if we don't fix this alliance. "Russia can sell us cheaper crude and air defence systems, but it cannot compensate for the loss of an economic partnership" with by far our largest trading partner. Our exports, our IT sector, the expats who send us remittances: all depend on this relationship. So we'll just have to suck it up, swallow our pride and get these tariffs reversed.