Why India’s Russian Oil Imports are Suddenly Bugging Trump with Suhasini Haidar

Insights on how India can navigate uncertainty, define its red lines, and reset its US trade strategy for the future

28 Aug 2025 5:00 PM IST

In this episode, journalist Puja Mehra speaks to Suhasini Haidar, Diplomatic Affairs Editor of The Hindu, about what India’s failed trade deal with Donald Trump reveals about the country’s foreign policy. The discussion unpacks how India balances principles with pragmatism in global negotiations, the costs of missed opportunities in its own neighbourhood, and the deeper shifts from globalisation to populism that are reshaping trade worldwide. Suhasini also explains why India’s diplomatic space depends not only on economic choices but also on the strength of its democratic and pluralistic values.

Tune in for insights on how India can navigate uncertainty, define its red lines, and reset its strategy for the future.

NOTE: This transcript is done by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on [email protected].

TRANSCRIPT

Puja Mehra: Hi Suhasini, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Suhasini Haidar: Thanks for having me. I mean, having been colleagues for so many years, it's great to be on your podcast.

Puja Mehra: I know all along from chatting with you as a colleague and from reading you, getting to interview you. So I wanted to start by requesting you to help those of us who follow the economy and trade side of things. You know, we are hearing so much on geopolitics and how it is influencing trade negotiations.

So various things that we used to track. One new variable is, you know, President Donald Trump, his tariff tantrums, but also the fact that he's conducting foreign policy through tariffs, etc, etc, etc. So I wanted to request you as a foreign policy specialist, help us understand what has suddenly changed for geopolitics to become so important.

And then also, what are the things that you think we should track, you know, so that we have some semblance, some sense of what's going on?

Suhasini Haidar: Puja, I think if there's one phrase to sum up what we should have expected, it is that the best laid plans often go awry. And these ones seem to have gone quite off the rails, because since last year, there had been a sort of almost euphoria in India, as relations with the US kind of began to flag over a number of issues, but including the intelligence operations, alleged intelligence operations that the US was prosecuting India for. And when those ties began to fray a little bit, there was this sense that hope was going to come from Donald Trump, that it was essentially a Biden administration problem, a Democrat administration problem.

But here was going to be Trump. He was a known quantity for India. We had had a good relationship with him in the past term, and that he had a very close personal relationship with Prime Minister Modi as well.

I think there were misgivings for many people, but maybe they were brushed under the carpet with the idea that if Donald Trump is the kind of president who makes all the decisions himself, then that was a good thing for India. So what we're seeing, firstly, is the kind of disappointment on the basis that Trump himself would be, quote unquote, good for the US-India relationship and good for India, even if he was unpredictable on a number of other relationships. We felt that there was a certain continuity that he was going to bring to Trump 2.0. The second, I think, is perhaps an idea in Delhi that we could start the free trade agreement negotiations from February 2025. And by that, I mean when Prime Minister Modi was invited to the White House, he was, I think, the third or fourth leader to go to the White House at the time. Mr. Jaishankar had already been for Trump's inauguration. There had already been a Quad meeting.

So far, everything looked very good. So when Mr. Trump said he wanted to bring the FTA talks up front, and this is, remember, a few weeks before he'd even started to speak about reciprocal tariffs for the rest of the world, there was a sense that, look, he's taking us into confidence. Yes, he is a bit tough on free trade issues.

But because we have the first mover's advantage here, we will probably have a good chance of concluding an early harvest agreement and then a larger part of what was called the first chapter of this FTA by the end of this year. In any case, Mr. Trump was due to come to India in October, November or thereabouts for the Quad summit. So it seemed as if everything was coming together really well.

And there was also a corollary to the expectation with the India-US free trade agreement, which was that all of India's other agreements that were being negotiated, so with the UK, with the European Union, with Australia, with New Zealand, some of the multilateral ones with the GCC, EAEU, the Eurasian Economic Union, all of those would also be benefited by the negotiation. So if India was able to negotiate both domestically as well as with the United States for certain parameters to work within, those would then translate into other deals. As we know, the UK deal did go through, but then agriculture was not an issue.

And that's where I was making that second point that perhaps we didn't read the tea leaves from Trump 1.0 and assumed that we would start negotiations from scratch. Here we had a scenario where the Trump administration put its problems with Indian negotiations up front. So normally, as you know, the negotiations normally say, let's do the easy stuff.

Let's build a culture of agreement between us and then leave the really tough stuff to the end. That's how normal negotiations go. Instead here, Mr. Trump made his expectation and he made it, Mr. Lutnick made it, Mr. Besant made it, others made it. Peter Navarro, of course, has written a paper on it, which hopefully our officials would have read. And all of those pointed to one thing. They wanted Indian tariffs to be lowered.

They wanted agricultural market access. They wanted dairy access and removal of phytosanitary barriers, removal of other barriers. And finally, they wanted entry of GM foods and GM vegetables and fruit.

Those are really tough issues for India. And I think the expectation that we could have left those for the end and actually just had a deal on the basis of these tariffs was misplaced. I call it mismatched expectation.

There was an expectation from the US. There was an expectation from India. They didn't match.

And it was too late by the time we figured out that those weren't matching. Now, you add the third part to it. The third layer, which was Operation Sindhu, completely unexpected that the US president would claim to have mediated the ceasefire.

In fact, the US normally does get involved, even in 2019. Mr. Trump was the first to announce that Captain Abhiram was being released by the Pakistani government of Imran Khan at the time. So that's not something new that Americans are in touch with both sides.

But I think there was no understanding of what he meant when he said he had mediated the ceasefire and that he announced the ceasefire half an hour before the Indian side did. I think, again, there was an unrealistic expectation that he was just making the claim and he would walk away from it when, in fact, what we're seeing is a pattern of Mr. Trump wanting to be seen as the peacemaker, wanting to be that contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. It may be laughable for many in India.

Many said we can't take this seriously. But actually, we should have started taking it seriously in the subsequent weeks when we saw things like the deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia or Congo and Rwanda or what he's been trying to do between Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky, get them into a room together. His purpose has been to stack up these wins.

He's claiming about six or seven ceasefires already. And this was one part of it. So the idea he would walk away from that, I don't think was seen.

So I think what happened really was a failure to perhaps understand how much was coming over from Trump 1.0 and as well as for reading the Now, when you ask how his politics become important, I think that's because this is an era in which countries are dealing with each other on the basis that their leaders are dealing with each other. You have a situation where it's all about which leader is meeting which leader. It's not about an agreement that was going to be forged in Alaska, for example, between Mr. Trump and Putin. It was that Trump had invited Putin there and they were talking or the image of all those European leaders going into the White House and sitting. At a time like this, and here I will come to the fourth part. At a time like this, there seems to have only been one publicly acknowledged conversation between Prime Minister Modi and President Trump.

That was on June 17. And that doesn't seem to have gone very well because we saw the Indian readout, which was all about how India had made it clear that Mr. Trump's claims were invalid. On the U.S. side, there was no record. There was no readout of that conversation, indicating perhaps there's more trouble. In every trade negotiation, Mr. Trump has played this brinkmanship. Let's be clear.

He has played the brinkmanship with Japan. He's played it with Europe. He's played it with Switzerland.

He's played it with every country. And in each of those cases, what we saw was the leader of the country and Mr. Trump speaking over a telephone. Indonesia, for example, woke up to a deal when they didn't even know that there was an agreement.

Vietnam, Japan, they all woke up to deals that were made over the telephone or in personal meetings like the Swiss president. In those deals, we now have a pattern of what was offered that kind of sweetened the path. So the first was the idea that those countries were willing to talk about tariffs.

The second, that they were willing to invest in the U.S., so announce large investments in the U.S. The third, that they were going to make energy purchases or defence purchases and somehow even out what he sees. And you know, as an economist, that talking about the trade deficit is not very logical, but yet that is the equation they had built. We didn't see that conversation happening at our end, which would have perhaps taken it through that last mile.

And because of the timing of how things happened, it unravelled. So then we come to the fifth part, which is dealing on Russian oil. Is that really the issue that the U.S. is making it out to be? Because of course, we remember the U.S. has not for all these years really put sanctions on India. Secondly, Mr. Trump himself was the last person to tell India to stop its oil intake from Russia. The third, as the external affairs minister has said again and again, China does a lot more purchasing of oil.

The fourth, the U.S. itself has increased its bilateral trade with Russia since Mr. Trump came to power. So why is India being punished for this? And I think if we don't look at all these parts, these five points to the conversation over the last few months, we will not really be able to get a true picture of how things went off the rails.

Puja Mehra: Suhasini, absolutely. So many things that we had not been noticing, even those of us who were closely following things. But you've made some very, very important points.

One, if I understand you correctly, you're saying some overconfidence may have crept in to the way our negotiators were dealing with U.S. negotiators because they assumed that there was so much chemistry between the two countries' leaders that it would take care of any dead ends that they were hitting. That's number one. Two, I think they may have lost sight of the fact that even in Trump's first presidency, there were trade-related issues between the U.S. and India. President Trump's first administration had imposed tariffs on India and India had imposed reciprocal tariffs, for instance, on steel, aluminium, etc. And then they had withdrawn our generalised reference treatment under which we got referential terms from them for concessional exports to them. Then you also say that although the U.S. side and the India side said that one of the first deals that President Trump would sign would be with India, we let the initiative get out of our hands and we prolonged perhaps these negotiations for way too long. And UK, I think, walked away with the best deal because they got the first deal when he was still trying very hard to show that he needs to cut deals. And that may have been sort of a bit of a setback, which we then never recovered from. And then all of the other things that you've described, which we just completely lost sight of.

There were so many red flags saying they were there, that we completely lost sight of. And in the end comes the Russian oil bid, which I want to ask you, all these months that we were negotiating, the Russian oil bid was never a problem. It just suddenly became a problem now.

We were supposed to sign the very first deal. So it could not possibly have been the reason why things went off track.

Suhasini Haidar: Well, my own sense is, and here I'm going a little more with gut than by some kind of inside knowledge, but my own sense is once the trade deal really began to sour, and it began to sour a few weeks before because there was a sense that India was not willing to budge on these issues. Remember Howard Lucknick giving that very interesting interview to two podcasters, I've forgotten their names, but it was a very long interview, maybe two hours or so, but there's a bit in there where he spoke about India. And he said that in February, when Prime Minister Modi had gone to Washington, he had asked Mr. Trump's permission to walk up to him during the dinner and say to him, Mr. Modi, you, and this is, I'm now quoting Mr. Lucknick, you brag about the size of the Indian economy and the Indian market. Why can't you buy a bushel of American corn? And what he was indicating by that, and if you saw the interviews he gave, I think to India today, very clearly making the point that the Indian side was coming to him with a deal that he was not interested in. He was not interested in deciding whether apricots or almond kernels or pecans could be sold to India.

He was interested in a comprehensive deal that gave the U.S. access to the Indian agricultural market, the dairy market, the GM market. These are very, very big, sensitive issues for India. And my sense is that we either did not convey adequately or they did not understand adequately how important it was for India not to be seen as budging on those issues.

You've covered these trading negotiations for how many years. And the idea that India was not willing to budge on these should have been actually there up front. Maybe it would have meant in February itself, the deal would have been called off.

But it would not have gone through a period of such high expectation that then when the disappointment comes, it kind of fell off. So the Russian oil, according to me, was not the real irritant. Because now, you know, we have Mr. Vance, for example, saying that we've put pressure on India so that it'll put pressure on Russia to stop the war. The idea that India has that kind of clout should have been answered when Prime Minister Modi first told Mr. Putin this era is not in war. He went to Moscow after that and tried to entreat with him. And Mr. Putin has continued with his operations and his war in Ukraine. So it's quite clear to everyone that India does not have that kind of clout, that if anyone has that clout, it's possibly China. China is off the table. So my own sense is when the trade deal went south, it was then you start looking around for what other ways in which you could put pressure on India.

This is a file that has been sitting on the Biden administration's desk, we know, since 2022. Since March 2022, when a US Treasury official came to India and said there will be consequences if you continue to buy Russian oil. It is true that later they made a virtue of necessity and said, it's OK, you buy the oil, keep it below the price cap, help others diversify so that the market stabilises and all the rest of that.

But this has been a sore point for the US, for Europeans since 2022. If you gave them a flat choice, should India buy Russian oil of the amount it is, you know, 30-40% of Russia's output, 30-40% of India's input, they would have said, yes, please stop all of this purchase because they've been saying for a while that you are actually funding the Russians. So it seemed like a weak case to bring out.

But Mr. Trump obviously decided that this was one way of putting a little more pressure on India. Even the outreach to Pakistan, Puja, and I may be wrong here, but you might find that many of the parts of the outreach to Pakistan, the idea that the US is going to now explore for oil in Pakistan, and Mr. Trump says, maybe I'll sell some to India. These seem to me all indicators of trying to put pressure on India, hoping it will break somewhere so that there's a breakthrough in the trade negotiations.

Puja Mehra: Yeah, what you're saying is very important. What you're saying is that there was a huge expectation from India, given how India's been working on its economy, the economy is growing. So there was an expectation that India would begin to play by the rules expected of a large economy.

And India sort of has resisted doing that for long, for very long, the Western world has sort of not paid attention to it, in the hope that, you know, a time will come where India will reduce some of these protection for farmers, for instance, this is something that comes up at WTO negotiations, it has in the past come up also. So that expectation, they thought that this is when, you know, given that there was a whole huge number of Indian economists here in India who are making a case for it, saying that, you know, time is ripe for some of these protection walls to go down. Once they realised that the Indian side was not willing to give in, there is a sort of a re-rating of India in their economic analysis that has taken place.

And therefore, they have brought in this whole Russian oil thing that you're saying, how to deal with India may have, I hope temporarily, but may have sort of how to look at India may have changed some bit. Did I get you right? Is something of that sort?

Suhasini Haidar: I don't think the US is necessarily acting completely as a rational player, because a rational player will look at how the other country has behaved over a large period of time. If in Trump 1.0, these were no-go areas, they don't disappear and suddenly appear on the table just because Mr. Trump has come back to power. India does very, very rarely moves because of an external force.

I think also that the Modi government, in a sense, gave Mr. Trump the wrong idea in 2017-18, when he said zero out oil from Iran and Venezuela. And it wasn't just about the oil. It was about the idea that the US would publicly say this, publicly send Nikki Haley to Delhi to announce that India must rework that relationship of oil purchase from Iran.

At a time when everybody knew Iran was giving India 12% of India's intake. It was sweeter, crude and better for our refineries and cheaper, much cheaper because of the sanctions already on Iran. And when India sort of caved over there, it may have given Mr. Trump the wrong idea. The idea that now after Iran and Venezuela, India would also give up Russian oil. I think that is a huge threat. So what I'm trying to say is that there seems to have been some amount of irrationalism on the American side, a refusal to understand where India was coming from over there.

And this idea that if they continue to raise the stakes up and we raise them to 25%, why is that important? Because the reciprocal tariffs are now much larger than all India's export rivals, whether it is Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, those are all at 19-20%. And you have taken away the GSP status, as you said, in 2019.

So the idea is to really put so much pressure on India, you give India no choice. But I think Mr. Trump has not completely understood what is going to make the Indian government move on this issue. And he's somehow expecting to play this out publicly, which of course is counterproductive, because after what he has said publicly, it's very difficult for an Indian government to give in, in a sense, or to be seen caving in after he has made his threats, made pejorative statements about India, and made it clear that he does not respect the government's sovereignty in that sense.

Puja Mehra: But that's exactly what he's been doing with all countries, including EU and Japan, with which the US had an FTA with Japan, and yet he has gone ahead and imposed tariffs on them. So just like India was expecting to be given special treatment, and found that hasn't happened, he also seems to have sort of miscalculated in thinking that India would be, he could treat India like he's treating Japan, UK, Korea, EU. It doesn't work with India.

Suhasini Haidar: These are all treaty allies, or part of the Five Eyes, or all the rest of that, they have a different equation, in a sense, with the US, there's a certain security blankets the US gives to them. India does not have those restraints on it. So there is essentially, you know, the tactics that have been used on the American side are also wrong.

But as I said, largely, what I think has happened is a case of mismatched expectation. If you say upfront, this is what I'm going to do, then you should be able to speak as equals, as people who appreciate honesty of each other. If, on the other hand, you give the impression that everything can be negotiated, when in fact, one doesn't have that much space, then you lead to these kind of mismatched expectations.

And you know, we should also point out that some of what Mr. Trump does on the agricultural issue is not just about making India work like other economies or obey the rules that others do. It is also about his own political constituencies, whether it's soy, whether it's corn, whether it's the chicken legs, whether it's a lot of these shrimp, they're all coming from states that are Republican core constituencies, you know, the South Carolinas, the Dakotas, the Michigan, you know, places where they expect to get the farmer's vote. And as a result, they are as much playing to their politics, their domestic politics, as perhaps the Indian government is.

Puja Mehra: Right. And so how do you think this will now play out in the future? Where are we going from here?

Because the way world trade is moving, the way everything is being done by deals, it's not what is most beneficial trade for you to do. Investment is not going to respond for large part to the prospect of returns, but everything is becoming deal-based. That's the world the Trump administration is building.

And India is taking a stand and publicly taking a stand. Prime Minister Modi said that, you know, he's going to stand and protect farmers, Mr. Jaishankar and Mr. Piyush Goyal, the industry minister, trade minister, both of them have said that there are red lines that India is not going to cross. So we are sort of, we are not willing to budge from our position.

So what happens?

Suhasini Haidar: So to begin with the idea that India has, in a sense, got a game plan over here, I think the biggest piece in that game plan was getting the U.S. trade deal, at least some kind of an early harvest agreement done. By Wednesday, the U.S. is expected to put into place an extra 25% tariff on India. This 25% is already beginning to hurt in terms of orders that have been stopped, in terms of investments that were being planned, in terms of Apple's own plans to manufacture its telephones in India and that sort of thing.

That's one part to look out for. The second, as I said, are these other trade agreements that India has been hopeful. And remember, the way it was done, the way they have been announced, it almost seemed as if there was a grand plan to bring Indian economic reforms required for the trade agreements, a kind of inconsolence.

Actually, what we heard from the Prime Minister at Independence Day and now this plan for legislative and other types of reform would have gone hand in glove with the idea that we're negotiating these trade and investment agreements in many cases with the EU, with Australia, with New Zealand, with GCC, with EAEU. We have the IT guard, the ASEAN one as well, being revised now. And that would have perhaps worked very beautifully if we did see at the end of the year a Quad Summit in India, Mr. Trump coming. Now, that might still happen because Mr. Trump does change on a dime. We still don't know whether all the cards on both sides have been played out or whether this is high noon and now time for the guns to come out. But I think those are the markers we should look for.

What happens in the next few months in terms of the other trade agreements? Are we going to go ahead with those? What happens to the trade negotiators who were due to come to Delhi on August 25th?

Does that get rescheduled or is that just off the table? Because Mr. Trump seems to be trying to throw everything at us, including suspending the trade negotiations until the Russian oil deal is worked out, until the Russian oil is possibly contingent on other things. So that's the second.

And the third is, as I said, whether we can actually see the president of the US coming to India for the Quad Summit, which would then, he would only come if there were other parts of the deal going into place. So the free trade agreement would be one indicator. Another, which was actually a missed deadline, the Indian government had hoped to bring amendments to the Civil Liabilities Act for nuclear power plants.

And that was supposed to come in in the monsoon session. That would have allowed American nuclear power manufacturers to announce big deals in India, to construct nuclear power plants in India. That was also supposed to be on the list.

Obviously, the announcement of investments in US energy, as well as defence purchases, for the moment have been suspended because of the rest of the political relationship where it is. So if you see something moving on any of those, you probably will see a visit by the US president, in which case you can expect a better relationship down the road.

Puja Mehra: And do we sort of hold any guards that we can sort of use to change the colour, complexion of this relationship?

Suhasini Haidar: I certainly think that India has always, you know, the cheese stands alone, as they say. India has not been part of the rest of the world. It has not been part of the Western countries that sort of more or less said, look, this is a deal that has to be made.

Let's just make it. Let Mr. Trump get his win and let's move on. Because the cost of infuriating the US president when he has so much power at this time inside his country with the legislation, the judiciary and the executive is not worth it.

And there's a lot of gains to be made in actually getting past this first post with the US. On the other hand, you do have countries like Canada or China who have not accepted that and have put counter tariffs when the US has proposed tariffs. My sense is that India will always be a kind of outlier to everyone else.

It's about being slow, steady, continuous, but knowing what your red lines are. It's interesting that External Affairs Minister Jai Shankar has spoken about red lines, but then are those red lines going to remain? Are you going to keep to your principles?

Because eventually there will be a trade-off between pragmatism and principles. You cannot cut a deal where you essentially give up on your core principles without losing something else down the road. As I said to you earlier, when India decided to give up Iranian and Venezuelan oil, it was a decision more or less, if not celebrated, it was more or less accepted in the Indian sort of commentariat as this was necessary.

It was pragmatism to give up Iranian oil in 2018. However, down the line, and now we know seven years down the line, it doesn't seem like as pragmatic a decision because it kicked the can down the road. It showed India as a country that didn't necessarily stand up for its principles when it really counted.

Because in the past, when the US has asked India to cut Iranian oil, which is quite a few times, India had said no, that even if we need to reduce because of sanctions, we are not going to cancel our oil imports. Giving up your principles also comes at a certain cost. And I think down the line, you will have to decide what kind of power India actually wants to be.

Is it going to be the power that eventually caves? So it's just a question of how much pressure is put, or is it going to be the power that says, this is the long game? And I'm willing to wait out the long game and sound considerable pain to myself.

But if I give up on the principles right now, then I will have no more cards to play.

Puja Mehra: And in a world where so much is up in the air, and everything can change, if you're holding on to your principles and your morals, then at least the negotiating sides as well as the larger economic and business interests on both sides know that there is one constant and then they can sort of assess accordingly.

Suhasini Haidar: Because it's like water, you know, negotiations are like water, they find a way around, but they need to know what are the impermeables. One more point I did want to make Puja, and that is you had spoken earlier about the world getting upended anyway by Mr. Trump. I would say actually the world has been upended since the financial collapse of 2008, 2009, and the idea that globalisation became a dirty word.

That slowly countries, whether they were rich or poor, were looking at globalisation and say, either I am not getting the economic benefits from it, or I am losing my cultural values to it. And as a result, it's unleashed a kind of plethora of populist regimes around the world, for different reasons, you know, some are very left wing, some are very right wing. But we saw a whole series in the 2010s of populist regimes, which by nature are about each country for themselves.

The idea of my country first. And as a result of that, and India is no exception to that rule, as a result of this kind of pushing away of globalisation as a good, and hyper nationalism only giving you the ability to build on your own market and not grow markets outside. Actually, the beneficiary of all of has been the regional markets.

Whether we see it as an actual philosophical impetus or not, we do know that whether it's RCEP or ASEAN, whether it's Mercosur or the African Continental Free Trade Agreement area, or even the USMCA between US, Canada and Mexico, they saw a surge in the late 2010s in trade regionally and much more than we saw in terms of bilateral trade. Where does that leave India? And so I do want to make the point that at some point, if we are willing to be pragmatic and deal with the US, despite their unreasonable demands, if we are willing to be pragmatic and deal with China, Prime Minister Modi now going to China and a lot of economic agreements expected, despite what China did at the LAC, the transgressions along the LAC in 2020 and the Galwan clashes, then we need to bring some of that pragmatism to the region as well. For too long, India has behaved as if it can live without its neighbours, when in fact the neighbours are our biggest potential market, when in fact the supply chains can be more resilient in the neighbourhood than anywhere else and have made trade, investment, infrastructure, connectivity, electricity and all the rest contingent on political relationships within the neighbourhood, which has led, according to me, to a huge loss of opportunity for India. And if we are thinking, if we are going to do that great reset and think about where India must stand in a world that has so much uncertainty, we can't but come to the conclusion that the neighbourhood has to be a big part of that strategy.

Puja Mehra: From what you're saying and this discussion, Indian diplomacy, Indian foreign policy is not coming out looking very good.

Suhasini Haidar: Well, I wrote a piece on this and I said, don't blame the messenger. That was Shakespeare's words, blame not the messenger. At the end of the day, the foreign policy can only work off what is already a domestic policy.

And also it must have space. If domestic policy is everything, then diplomacy becomes impossible. Domestic policy is important, but it must have a place in all of this.

In this idea, if every country is going to be my interest first, then which country can deal with any other country? I wouldn't necessarily blame diplomacy. I would say that one has to understand that if you are going to engage with other countries, then your own personal message has to be much stronger.

And I know that you deal really with economics, but I can tell you, Puja, that even in terms of the social messaging that India sends out, in terms of the political messaging that India sends out, as long as it is seen as a pluralistic, dare I say, secular rule international rule abiding, a country that abides by certain rules and values, and is a democracy internally, as well as in terms of its values abroad, as long as India is that, there's always space for diplomacy within India.

The moment India tries to shed any of these values, then it either doesn't become the obvious counter to China, or it doesn't become a country that a lot of others are comfortable always engaging with. Certainly what it does is it shrinks India's diplomatic space. And I think that's something our strategic thinkers should be doing a little bit more consideration for.

Puja Mehra: And in a world where countries are saying my country comes first, then obviously bullies and strongmen sort of get to dictate, and it's might is right versus right is might. Perhaps might is right is going to sort of have the day at least. Well, thank you so much for this conversation and for helping us understand where we are today and what we need to keep track of for the future.

Suhasini Haidar: Thank you. Thank you Puja for having me on.

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