Modi-Trump bromance ends on sour note

January 03, 2019 20:41

The highly disparaging remarks to by United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday regarding Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India's role in Afghanistan come as a shocking revelation.

Trump was talking to the press following his first cabinet meeting of 2009 at the White House in Washington.

No Indian PM has been reduced to look silly like this by any American president in history.

Trump's remarks came in the course of his rambling speech regarding the failure of the war in Afghanistan. He spoke every bit as an embittered man who realises that the war has been lost.

Part of the reason why he summarily put Modi on the mat could have been that Trump also realises the great urgency of extracting Pakistan's cooperation in the Afghan endgame.

Trump's thesis was that foreign leaders take America for a ride.In this vein, Trump mocked Modi for funding a library in Afghanistan under Indian aid and bragging about it repeatedly in private conversations (Trump apparently mistook for a library the Indian-built parliament building in Kabul, which Modi inaugurated in a grand ceremony on Christmas Day in 2015.)

Anyway, Trump claimed that Modi was 'constantly telling me he built a library in Afghanistan'. He then rubbished Modi's vanity, saying, "You know what that is? That's like five hours of what we spend (in Afghanistan.) And we're supposed to say (to Modi), 'Oh, thank you for the library'. I don't know who's using it in Afghanistan.'

This is the first time the US belittled the Indian assistance to Afghanistan, which is estimated to be close to $2 billion.

The American mantra has been that India was rendering invaluable help to Afghanistan. But now that the war is about to end, we are probably getting a candid version of what the Americans really thought of the quality of the Indian aid.

Yet, Trump has forgotten that in his own Afghan strategy of August 2017, he had given fulsome praise for India's role in Afghanistan.

Read the full blog by M K Bhadrakumar

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