Will meet fantastic man PM Modi during his US visit, says Trump

New York: Former President Donald Trump has said he will meet “fantastic man” Prime Minister Narendra Modi next week when he visits the US.

"He happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he's fantastic. I mean, fantastic, man,” Trump said on Tuesday at a town hall meeting in Flint, Michigan.

PM Modi will be in the US from Saturday to Monday, according to the Ministry of External Affairs.

The Ministry’s programme listed only PM Modi’s participation in the Quad Summit in Delaware on Saturday, his speech to the Indian diaspora on Long Island on Sunday, and his address to the United Nations Summit of the Future on Monday.

It did not mention meeting with Trump but said, “On the sidelines of the Summit, the Prime Minister would be holding bilateral meetings with several world leaders and discuss issues of mutual interest.”

Trump's campaign calendar shows him in North Carolina on Saturday and in Pennsylvania on Monday evening, with nothing pencilled in for Sunday.

The former president mentioned the meeting with PM Modi while talking about trade imbalances and how he would hike duties on imports from India through a Trump Reciprocal Tax Act.

He called India “a very big abuser” of the tariffs system because of the high duties it imposes on some imports from the US and said New Delhi “is very tough” in negotiations.

“If anybody charges us 10 cents, if they charge us $2, if they charge us 100 per cent 250, we charge them the same,” he said.

Listing India among them, he said that countries the US was trading with are “the sharpest people. They're not a little bit backward … they're at the top of their game, and they use it against us”.

He added, “China is the toughest of all, but we were taking care of China with the tariffs, so we're going to do a reciprocal trade.”

While in office Trump tangled with India over tariffs, putting a spotlight on the duties on Harley-Davidson motorcycles and whiskey.

He hiked duties on steel and aluminium imports and eliminated the Generalised Scheme of Preferences that provided for concessional tariffs for some Indian exports and New Delhi retaliated by raising duties mostly on agricultural exports like apples and almonds.

Even though they had differences on trade, PM Modi and Trump developed strong personal ties.

With elections about five weeks away and Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in almost a tie, PM Modi has a tightrope walk ahead -- not appearing to favour either party but also having to keep his lines of communication open to both.

Before the 2020 election that Trump lost, PM Modi appeared alongside him at a community event billed as “Howdy Modi”, in Houston in 2019 and, in a play of his own election slogan, cheered him, “Abki baar, Trump sarkar” (This time, Trump’s government”).

That and a spectacle for Trump with over 1,00,000 people in Ahmedabad in 2020 became an embarrassment when Biden defeated him.

But Biden and PM Modi brushed it aside and further developed ties between their nations.

(Arul Louis can be contacted at [email protected] and followed at @arulouis)