There is understandable rage and dismay in India — and joy in Pakistan —at multiple aspects of President Donald Trump’s repeated remarks, including during his visit to the Gulf, a sensitive region for us. We could attribute these to eagerness for instant personal successes, especially given others he set out to achieve still elude him; or, otherwise, to his aversion for war. Yet, it should not be a surprise, given his remarks after the Balakot strike in 2019 and his meetings with Pakistani leaders, the appreciation for Pakistan’s counter-terrorism cooperation in the State of the Union address in January, or the transactional, rather than geopolitical, approach to relations with India.

Indian disappointment comes from what appears as America’s amoral and insensitive position on our Pahalgam response. It also arises from public perception of the relationship shaped by the hyperbolic American projection of India-US relations as the “defining partnership of the 21st century”, the narrative of the global framework of relations, the warm optics of the bilateral and Quad summits, and, equally, the saturation media and think tank attention in India on this relationship to the exclusion of almost every other. President Trump’s victory was, perhaps, more welcomed in India than elsewhere.

Trump’s statements also reflect an American institutional approach to India-Pakistan relations that has endured through the transformation of India-US relations since the turn of the century. As written before in these columns, cross-border terrorism is contextualised in the context of India-Pakistan relations and the “Kashmir dispute”; terrorism is replaced by focus on conflict prevention with nuclear risks; the aggressor and the victim are equated; and, India and Pakistan are lumped........

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