Nikhil Kumar is Executive Editor at TIME. He was previously TIME's South Asia Bureau Chief and a senior editor working on international coverage. Before rejoining TIME, he served as Deputy Global Editor at The Messenger and was CNN's New Delhi Bureau Chief. He also worked at Grid, and as an editor and foreign correspondent for the Independent and the Evening Standard.
EXPERT Q&A – A critical bilateral summit between the leaders of the world’s largest democracies was overshadowed this week, nearly drowned out by the swirl of news involving Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the Trump Administration’s plans to end the conflict. On Thursday, President Trump welcomed India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House, for a meeting between nations that have drawn closer over the years, thanks in part to a shared competition with China. That said, there have been rifts in the relationship, and as with the Trump approach to many American allies, tensions over trade and immigration hung over the Modi talks.
After the summit, India and the U.S. agreed to start talks to reach a trade deal and end a standoff over tariffs, as New Delhi promised to buy more U.S. oil, gas and military equipment.
Cipher Brief Managing Editor spoke with Nikhil Kumar, a reporter and editor with longstanding experience in India who now serves as Executive Editor at Time. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can also watch their full discussion on The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
Nagorski: What were your takeaways from the meeting and the statements that were made afterwards?
Kumar: My first and main takeaway was just how well Mr. Modi managed meeting Mr. Trump — a different Mr. Trump with a different Trump administration, as we’ve all seen over the past few weeks. And in light of all of this stuff about tariffs and what that might do, he played it quite well. He pressed the right buttons. He clearly came with things to say on that front – that India will begin negotiations about dealing with what Mr. Trump called “strong tariffs” that India has on so many American goods. Cars, he mentioned, for example, some vehicles are at 70 % and used to be a lot higher. So he clearly came prepared for all of that. And that’s something that Modi is good at. We can talk about the things that he’s not good at. But he is good at PR. And for an American president who also takes that seriously, Mr. Modi played that quite well.
Nagorski: Modi met with Elon Musk just prior to the Trump meeting. Would you put that in the category of a smart button to push – that Narendra Modi came and had the meeting he did with Mr. Musk just prior to seeing the president?
Kumar: Certainly it was a familiar button to push. We’ll see how the Musk-Trump relationship plays out. But for Mr. Modi it was a familiar button to push because Mr. Modi of course comes from a country where there are a lot of billionaire businessmen in the background. He himself is allied with a few – or I should say, the other way around. Some of them are allied with him. Mr. Modi is familiar to that extent, transacting, dealing with friends with business people who are there in the background.
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Nagorski: What about the defense partnership? Is this just a continuation, do you think, of a growing U.S.-India defense relationship, or is there something new here – because it was presented by both sides as almost a new, exciting bit of business.
Kumar: I would say it’s a continuation. It’s very characteristic of the Trump administration – almost everything is presented as new. And Mr. Modi is also very good at doing that. Everything is presented as new. But the US-India military partnership predates them both. There was a time when India’s military relationship and even broader economic relationship was with Russia and the former Soviet Union, and that’s been shifting since about the 90s. We had the Indo-US nuclear deal under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And so this has been building up. And I’d say what was announced this week is a continuation. It is another step forward. We’ll see where it goes.
The comments and releases about [India buying] U.S. fighter jets, for instance, that’s still at a proposal stage. There’s all kinds of things that need to be worked out. India wants more. It wants things such as technology transfers, not just actual partnership, but actual technology transferring. That’s been a bit of an issue. But overall, the US-India military ties are a deepening of that relationship.
China has a lot to do with this. Sometimes people think of this as just having to do with India’s land border with China in the north. But it’s also, of course, the Indo-Pacific and the Quad partnership.
Nagorski: One of the irritants in the U.S.-India relationship in the past few years was that for all the efforts to sanction Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, India continued to buy significant amounts of Russian oil. I recall the foreign secretary saying at one point, We don’t support the war, but we’re going to do what matters for India, and cheap oil is good for us. I didn’t hear anything much about that at this week’s summit.
Kumar: I didn’t hear much about that either. On that front, the one thing I will say is that when
the war broke out in Ukraine, and in the months after, there was a lot of commentary and talk about what India was doing. But what was also true and became clear as the war unfolded, was that all this stuff about what India was buying from Russia, the reports about the “shadow fleets” [carrying Russian oil] and so on, none of it was a secret from the United States. And so you could make the argument that for whatever was said publicly, particularly on the domestic front where the U.S. was dealing with high inflation, it made sense for India to continue doing this vis-a-vis the global oil market, because while India was in one respect doing something that was helping Russia, if you dig a bit deeper, it was also doing something that helped the United States by making sure that on the global oil market, that supply wasn’t taken out of the equation, which would have then affected prices and then affected domestic inflation, et cetera.
So I didn’t hear much, I suspect that’s also probably because everyone’s waiting to find out what actually happens with that conflict.
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Nagorski: Along with the substantive things Modi brought to the conversation with Mr. Trump, he also brought a slogan: He said that there is now something that he calls Make India Great Again, and he described that as MIGA. And then he said, “MAGA plus MIGA is a mega partnership for prosperity.” So first, I guess he gets an A-plus for clever slogans, but if “Make India Great Again is your thing,” that sounds like a recipe for competition and not collaboration on a lot of fronts – and certainly on trade and tariffs, no?
Kumar: It does. And yes, Mr. Modi is very good at sloganeering. Some might say even that he’s a little bit too good, and that perhaps he should devote more of his energy to the substantive business of governance and policy and so on.
It is a statement that on the face of it, as you say, might mean a competition with the U.S. But for India to succeed, whatever he might say in terms of slogans and so on, he really does need the U.S. to remain a partner and not become a threat to what he’s trying to do domestically – which right now is dealing with slowing economic growth. And so I think he’s trying to just make sure that he is not hit with massive tariffs [from the U.S.], which would make the economic picture even more complicated, particularly in the aftermath of an election where he really didn’t do that well. And he faces all kinds of challenges and problems domestically.
If you scratch the surface, he’s not in the strongest position, no matter what the largely uncritical mainstream Indian media might say. And he does need to be careful. At the end of the day, they do need the U.S. and I think they recognize it, particularly in this moment of vulnerability. Mr. Modi really can’t afford to be hit by punitive tariffs and so on from the U.S. So sure,he’s putting on a strong front and so on, but I’m pretty sure that behind the scenes, he’s doing everything he possibly can to make sure that – Mr. Trump, don’t hit us with double or triple of whatever you’re charging right now.
Nagorski: Well, he’s not alone there, right, among leaders on the world stage.
Kumar: He’s not alone. He’s not alone.
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