Trump-Modi bonhomie overdone: Swami Aiyar | Economic Times

India has not done well in the four years of Trump. Previously, under Obama, there was a push for India and the US was saying we will give you a seat in the UN. There has been nothing of that sort under Trump. Also India has been removed from the GSP list and no longer gets developing country advantages as far as the USA is concerned , says the Consulting Editor, ET Now. Would you say that if the 2014 US election was all about the economy and making America great again, it will be a similar plank this year as well?That is certainly the plank on which Trump wanted to run. He wanted to say look for four years under me the United States has forged ahead. We have record spurt in GDP because I cut the taxes, unemployment has fallen to a new low of 3.6% and he really hoped that this would take him to victory and then Covid struck. He attempted to deny it. He did crazy things like suggesting that cleaning material, then chloroquine could be used to solve it. He has been looking for various desperate measures to try and avoid talking about the negative effect of Covid. At the end of it, I am afraid Covid has been disastrous for the economy, for employment and so many of the claims that he wanted to go forward on, have fallen by the wayside. So he is back to the old tricks of racism, Biden being a sleepy fellow, Biden being very leftist, Biden being pro-China. He is attempting to target Biden to try and take the focus away from the economy and the handling of Covis which has been so bad in the USA that it has by far the largest number of deaths in the world, more than 200,000. Biden on the other hand has been running a very low key campaign. In some sense he has been allowing Trump to destroy himself by making a series of excessive statements. At the end of it, we now have the new revelation by the New York Times the other day. I would simply say at this point of time Trump is on the back foot. Trump is the underdog. He is hoping that Biden will slip up in the debate. Biden is hoping that if he just keeps his cool, Trump will continue to in some sense destroy himself. At the end of it all, let us see what happens as we know presidential debates usually cleanse the matter but Trump desperately needs to get something out of these debates to recover lost ground. Joe Biden has been letting Donald Trump do most the damage. Do you believe that this is not the time to drop the ball for Joe Biden, given the fact that Donald Trump already said that he is not going to lead to a peaceful transition to the new president and given the fact that he has raised concerns over mail in voting as well?Well without doubt, the United States has this very peculiar situation. Remember that while the election is in November, the new president will take over only at the end of January. There is more than two months in between and when he says I would not give up easily, well the fact is he does not have to give up the presidency. In between, there will be wrangling on the postal ballots. He has promised to put up a fight and it may go to the courts. But if you go back to the 2000 election of Gore versus Bush, there was a problem on the kind of voting that took place in Florida, so it went up and down to the Florida court to the Supreme Court, back again to the high court and again the Supreme Court for about a month before the Supreme Court decided it. So there might be something similar this time. There will be some delay. We are used to the idea that on election day we get to know the results the same night. In this particular case, perhaps that will not happen. The margins in some of the battle fields perhaps will be so slim that one has to wait for all the postal votes to come down and then to see what happens if there are legal challenges. When the economy starts doing better, you rarely see a change in the top leadership. This time will it be more about the economy or is it going to be about Covid-19 or is it going to be the corporate tax issue? He himself has not paid tax for 10 years.I would simply say that Trump’s own supporters are not people who are worried about issues like this. He has been loved by his supporters for being politically incorrect, and they have been brazenly partisan. He used to say clever people do not pay taxes. He has openly said it several times and in some sense his base will say look at this clever guy, he has built up this billion dollar empire without having paid taxes. The New York Times report also says that he has a large number of payments due and that has always been the case. He has the stand of a highly leveraged business empire and he has managed to run it this far. So I would say from the point of view of the democrats, this will confirm what they thought about Trump but as far as Republicans are concerned, I do not think this will change their opinion of Trump. So I do not think that the revelations in The New York Times about his tax offence will change things very much. His supporters think he is clever and they will say hurrah the guy did not pay taxes and now what’s more he cut taxes for everybody when he became president. I do not think that is a negative. What is negative is the fact that the economy has been hard hit and the fact that he has mismanaged Covid quite a lot. Where do you see things headed for the relationship between India and the US? We all know about the bonhomie between US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. What is it that Indian Americans are looking forward to when the polls happen on November 3rd?As far as India is concerned, the idea that there is a great bonhomie between Trump and Modi is overdone. There have been considerable tensions. India has been removed from the GSP list which has greatly affected our exports. It has been forced to change various other things and no longer get developing country advantages as far as the USA is concerned. So to say that there is a great bonhomie is overdone. Trump claims to have great bonhomie with Xi Jinping or even the North Korean dictator. I would say that things are not done on the basis of bonhomie. If you look at the actual relations between India and the USA, they have not done well in the four years of Trump. Previously, under Obama, there was a push for India and the US was saying we will give you a seat in the UN and so on. There has been nothing of that sort under Trump. So despite Trump’s and Modi’s claims of bonhomie, the fact is that the relations bilaterally have gone down. On the other hand, Trump has declared a new cold war against China and this has reverberated through Europe and very much through India, the latest being the border problem. I would say that India and the USA are getting together in a strategic sense and that strategic sense will carry on regardless of who wins the election. Now how far that will take us we do not know because certainly the USA is not going to send any armed troops or somebody to help us in case there is a serious border incident. But yes at a strategic level definitely, I would say India and the USA are being forced to come close together by the challenge from China militarily and on the question of whether Chinese investment and Chinese companies are in fact using various devices to spy on other countries. Trump has cracked down various Chinese companies. India is cracking down on Chinese companies. The strategic alignment has grown much stronger. But to what extent will it actually show up in bilateral economic relations is not clear yet. Those relations have been more strained under Trump, compared with the Obama administration. I have a feeling that the Biden regime might be more favourable to India. The minus point is that Trump does not really care about Modi cracking down in Kashmir, abolishing Article 370 and having military rule. The Democrats historically have been greater champions of human rights and might frown on what we are doing in Kashmir. That is one negative part but that is a relatively small part of the total. The main thing is the new alignment against China coming up and to that extent India and the USA will get closer together and hopefully some of these economic strains will go away.