The last couple of months have exposed the humiliating realities of the subordinate alliance that India has been gradually sliding into with the US over the last three decades.

The imposition of 50% tariffs on Indian exports to the US, calls on the European Union to impose 100% tariffs on India, the revocation of the US sanctions waiver for the operation of Iran’s Chabahar Port — of great interest to the Indian Government — the sanctions on Indian firms and individuals trading in Russian oil and, as a final nail in the coffin, the decision to set a US$1000 fee for applying for an H-1B visa: India has been dealt blow after blow by the US and the Trump administration within the past couple of months.

Calling India, the “tariff king”, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on Indian goods, essentially because India refused to subject its peasantry — whose average farm size is 2.5 acres — to competition from highly subsidised large US farmers, whose average farm size is 466 acres. He further imposed an additional 25% tariff while bizarrely accusing India of financing Russian persecution of Ukraine. One might be forgiven for mistakenly attributing the devastation in Ukraine to India and China rather than to the US-led NATO proxy war with Russia**.**

India’s textiles, leather goods, gems and jewellery industries, which are largely small- and medium-scale and labour-intensive, have been hit hard by the tariffs. While electronics has so far been exempted, last week’s announcement of a 100% tariffs on certain pharmaceutical products sent jitters through India’s pharmaceutical industry, which supplies 40% of the generic drugs........

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