Opinion | PM Modi's Évian Play: What Will It Take To Seal The Deal With Trump?

The deaths of the three seafarers cannot be dissolved into the arithmetic of a trade negotiation. They are a separate moral account, and India has been right to press it as such

Three Indian seafarers are dead, killed by the United States Navy in the Gulf of Oman. Their tanker was struck by Hellfire missiles. Twenty-one of their colleagues were pulled from the water. India’s External Affairs Minister called his American counterpart to say, in plain language, that what happened was “not justified". The US Chargé d’Affaires was summoned to the Ministry of External Affairs twice in three days. New Delhi raised the matter at the United Nations Security Council.

And now Narendra Modi is flying to France for the G7 and to negotiate and possibly finalise a trade deal with Donald Trump that has been alternately stalling and thawing for months.

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That is the state of the India-US relationship as it arrives at Évian-les-Bains this week. It is simultaneously a strategic partnership that both governments are publicly committed to deepening and one in which American naval aircraft have, in the past seven days, fired on three separate merchant vessels carrying Indian crews, killing three and exposing 68 to fire. The strikes targeted the MT Marivex, the MT Settebello, and the MT Jalveer, all operating in the Gulf of Oman, where US forces have imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports following Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. US Central Command acknowledged using Hellfire........

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