नवीनतम
'India Coming To The Table', says Navarro
NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: As US Assistant Trade Representative Brendan Lynch arrives in New Delhi for the crucial trade talks today (Sept 16), President Donald Trump’s Senior Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, who in recent days has repeatedly made comments critical of India, made a real gaffe on live TV as he got the sequence of social media communication between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump mixed up.
Stating that India was “coming to the table” to negotiate a trade deal, Navarro said it was PM Modi who sent out a "conciliatory" tweet (a post on X) to Trump, to which the US President responded. His remarks, however, are not accurate since it was Trump who first put out a toned-down post on Truth Social on US-India ties, to which PM Modi responded.
Speaking on the CNBC programme Squawk Box on Monday, Navarro said, "India is coming to the table. Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi sent out a very conciliatory, nice, constructive tweet, and President (Donald) Trump responded to that. We'll see how this works".
Navarro clearly got the sequence mixed up. Trump, in a Truth Social post on September 9, said that talks were continuing and “I feel certain that there will be no difficulty in coming to a successful conclusion for both of our Great Countries”. Calling PM Modi a “great friend”, he said he would be talking to him.
PM Modi then responded to Trump’s post about 17 hours later with, “I am confident that our trade negotiations will pave the way for unlocking the limitless potential of the India-US partnership”. He added that he was looking forward to talking with Trump.
Navarro, meanwhile, repeated his complaints about New Delhi having the highest tariffs, while his interviewer joked about his earlier comment about India being the “Maharaja of tariffs”.
“They have the highest tariffs of any major country. They have very high non-tariff barriers”, Navarro asserted. “We had to deal with that like we're dealing with every other country that does that”. “And by the way, there's this issue of India buying Russian oil, which they never did” before the Ukraine conflict," he claimed.
“Indian refiners got in bed with the Russian refiners immediately after the invasion, and they're making that like bandits”, he said. India buying oil from Russia, he claimed, had an ultimate cost to US taxpayers because when Moscow uses revenue from India to buy weapons, the US has to pay for arming Ukraine.
Navarro said that he thought PM Modi felt "uncomfortable" when he appeared with China’s President Xi Jinping in Tianjin last month."Watching Modi on the stage with China, which has been its long-time existential threat, and Putin, that was an interesting stretch. I don't think he felt comfortable”, he said.
US nominee to be ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, told a Senate panel considering his nomination last week that India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal was expected in Washington this week, and he will meet with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. However, before that, Brendan Lynch, a former director for India in the US Trade Representative’s office, is in New Delhi today for talks with India’s chief negotiator Rajesh Goyal.
After imposing a 25 per cent reciprocal tariff on India, adding a 25 per cent punitive tariff for buying Russian oil, and showering criticism, including calling its economy “dead”, Trump suddenly turned around with a conciliatory statement. He admitted to a Fox News interviewer last week that the tariff “causes a rift with India” and imposing it was “not an easy thing to do.”
