Trump has unleashed the law of the fish; India’s strategic autonomy will depend on tech sovereignty and hard reforms

‘Countering China’ is now a ‘countering India’ strategy. After bullying America’s allies and partners around the world over tariffs, Donald Trump has settled on India as a prime target. In so doing, Trump has junked more than two decades of bipartisan consensus in Washington DC across five administrations, including his own during first term, that a strong India is in America’s interest, and appears bent on decimating what remains of the bilateral relationship with a barely concealed hostility.

The trust that took the two sides over 25 painstaking years to build is gone. Driven more by personal pique than any grand strategic logic, Trump has taken a unilateral torch to the strategic partnership and is seeking to punish New Delhi for its defiance and refusal to become another of America’s vassal states.

Trump wants obeisance from the Modi government and suzerainty over India’s trade, energy and foreign policies. These are not well thought out policy positions. They flow from an intense personal animus, triggered by Trump’s bruised ego at India’s refusal to validate his lie that Trump engineered the post-Operation Sindoor ceasefire, and New Delhi’s “recalcitrance” at the US president’s pressure tactics and last-minute shifting of goalposts during trade talks.

India has also held firm in maintaining historic ties with Russia and kept on purchasing oil from Russia to ensure energy security. Trump has reacted with a volley of insults, and has slapped 50% tariffs on Indian exports, among the highest in the world. He has threatened to take further punitive steps and may bring pharma exports under the tariff ambit. Members of his cabinet are throwing daily verbal darts at India.

The price for India’s strategic autonomy has been steep. We keep throwing this buzzword around when it comes to foreign policy discourse, but the past few weeks have shown what it takes for India to uphold its post-colonial commitment to sovereignty and independence – the core principles that drive strategic autonomy.

Avoiding great power rivalries, rejecting formal alliances, hedging against external influences while advancing India’s economic and security interests through pragmatic engagements lie behind the doctrinal approach of strategic autonomy – through its evolution from non-alignment of Nehruvian years to multi-alignment under Narendra Modi.

The bill for strategic economy wasn’t too steep during peacetime when the global order was marked by stability and predictability underwritten by a hegemon. China is a unique beneficiary of this post-World War 2 order when the United States, the sole superpower, was ready to bankroll global prosperity through a system that also ensured the greatest benefits for itself.

That Madeleine Albright moment is behind us. America is now insecure, bitter and angry at loss of influence and has turned against the very order it had once authored and championed by electing an anarchist. Trump’s MAGA is a reactionary movement to command the waves and turn back the tide. It never works. But Trump does what he must.

As we move rapidly into a multipolar world marked by friction, conflicts in several theatres and steady erosion of America’s authority, what Trump and his game of poker with hard power shows us is amid fractured geopolitics, weaponised trade, naked posturing and rule of strength over rule of law, strategic autonomy is a costly exercise, especially for a middle power such as India.

India’s commitment to strategic autonomy is unshakeable, but it has not been underwritten by concomitant autonomy in key areas such as energy security, defence technology and military hardware, rare earths, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, supply chain resilience and advanced manufacturing. India still can’t make its own EV batteries, relies on China for solar panels, foreign engines for fighter jet programme, and is yet to build own digital infrastructure beyond UPI – its very own digital payment solution – in the fields of AI, quantum computing, advanced materials or robotics.

Semiconductor fabrication is getting a vigorous push, and the first chips may roll out as early as the end of this year, but India lacks its own Big Tech, social media and sovereign cloud platforms, its own search engines and has no strategic data independence.

As Microsoft’s unilateral suspension of access to critical IT services to Nyara Energy, India’s second-largest private oil refiner, showed, such moves may result in loss of sovereignty and severely impact India’s national security. Microsoft claimed it imposed European sanctions (foreign law) over Indian legal frameworks.

Strategic autonomy is also a game of leverages, and compared to players such as China, India has very few cards to retaliate against pressure tactics from a rogue American president. On Monday, the London-based Financial Times newspaper published a vituperative rant by Peter Navarro, the White House trade counsellor.

Navarro held India responsible for “laundering Russian oil”, and in an incredible display of illogic and arrogance motivated by rank strategic malpractice, accused India of being responsible for the death of “more than 300,000 soldiers and civilians” during Ukraine-Russia war.

India has been at the forefront of calling for peace ever since Russian invasion began. The prime minister went to Moscow and told Vladimir Putin that this “isn’t an era of war”.

Navarro accused India of fuel arbitrage and blamed India for not acting like a true “strategic partner”. His accusations have nothing to do with Russian oil. If it was, Navarro wouldn’t have overlooked the fact that China is the biggest buyer of Russian oil, the biggest customer of Russia’s fossil fuels, and the European Union continues to be the biggest buyer of Russian natural gas. Navarro was merely serving his master’s wishes.

Data from Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) shows that Russia earned 923 billion euros from fossil fuel exports since the Ukraine war, of which EU countries paid 212 billion euros, China over 200 billion euros, and India 121 billion euros.

Data from 2024 shows that EU’s total trade with Russia was worth 67.5 billion euros ($77.9 billion) whereas India’s was worth $68.7 billion. America itself buys large amounts of fertilizers and chemicals from Russia. Gasoline imports from India – sourced from Russian fuel – is exempt from Trumpian tariffs and as Putin said Friday, trade between the US and Russia has gone up by 20% since Trump returned to office.

To blame India for the weapons that Trump himself is sending to Ukraine, after campaigning against it as a presidential candidate, is inexplicable. Logic also cannot explain the argument of US secretary of state Marco Rubio, who claimed that China’s purchase of Russian fossil fuels stabilises global energy market, while India’s purchase fuels Putin’s war.

Speaking to Fox News on Monday (IST), Rubio said, “If you put secondary sanctions on a country – let’s say you were to go after the oil sales of Russian oil to China. Well, China just refines that oil.  That oil is then sold into the global marketplace, and anyone who’s buying that oil would be paying more for it or, if it doesn’t exist, would have to find an alternative source for it.”

This is the very logic that had prompted the Biden administration to request the Indian side to pick up price-capped Russian oil, a position that Trump has flipped on its head.

What Trump’s officials did here, or Trump himself did after meeting Putin in Alaska, when he abruptly dropped his demand for a ceasefire and sanctions on Russia, is aptly described as Matsya Nyaya (the law of the fish), an ancient Indian political concept where the strong devours the weak as bigger fish prey on the smaller ones without the framework or fiat of a higher authority.

Trump advised Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal by conceding Crimea and forget about joining NATO and end the war because “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not,” a position from where he seemed to have shifted again after meeting European leaders and the Ukrainian president at the White House Tuesday.

Trump’s propensity to exploit servility and feed off weakness while bowing down before a stronger actor, his philosophy of ‘might makes right’ closely resemble the power politics of Matsya Nyaya. That’s why Trump blinked before China’s retaliatory measure of imposing 125% tariff on American goods to counter Trump’s levy of 145 per cent. The US president climbed down, called for truce and since then has been suspending tariffs on China. He wants a face-to-face meeting with Xi Jinping and has been sending subtle signals of compliance with Chinese wishes to make that summit happen and broker a trade deal.

Trump understands that US and China are locked in a long-term strategic competition, but he has taken an accommodative stance towards Beijing while putting New Delhi under the cosh, because in Trump’s book, China is more powerful and deserves respect, while India can be pushed around without much of a consequence.

India can justifiably feel upset, but this is the reality of fragmented geopolitical climate ruled by power politics. India needs a decade or two of hard graft and achievements that China has accomplished in every sphere, just as India has through its secure digital payment solution, UPI.

Through the UPI, India has helped reduce the dependence of Indians on foreign payment networks, bypassing the duopoly of Visa or Mastercard. The United Payment Interface enables India to control its payments infrastructure, avoiding reliance on foreign entities for critical financial transactions. India retains full control over the data, execution and policies over digital economy, it has promoted financial inclusion and digital sovereignty, and UPI integration has helped boost the rise of RuPay, India’s very own card network.

According to a report in TechCrunch, “RuPay processed Rs 638 billion ($7.43 billion) in UPI credit card transactions in the first seven months of fiscal year 2025, nearly double from a year earlier. These figures now account for 28% of all credit card transactions in India, up from 10% last year,” forcing Visa and Mastercard to brace for impact and change policies in a market where their influence is rapidly waning.

On Monday, the prime minister chaired a high-level meeting to discuss “next-generation economic reforms.” He has already announced from the ramparts of Red Fort that GST will be simplified. That should ease consumer spending and improve business sentiment.

To become truly ‘Atmanirbhar’, India needs its very own social media and Big Tech platforms, AI models and tailored solutions. It will ensure that data stays local, under sovereign control and reduce vulnerabilities to actions and manipulations from foreign actors. Domestic tech ecosystems may generate high-skilled jobs, boost GDP figures and trigger a virtuous cycle through innovation and talent retention.

Being a ‘digital colony’ can’t be the fate of 1.4 billion people in a country whose young demographic profile is perfectly suited to exploit the ongoing digital revolution. However, this may only be possible by unleashing hard economic reforms. India needs to urgently reduce foreign dependencies, mitigate risks from sanctions, alleviate the pain of export controls, enhance national security and strengthen bargaining position in alliances and partnerships to exercise true strategic autonomy.