India may deepen ties with BRICS amid Trump’s erratic policies
US President Donald Trump’s second term has ruptured relationships with India built from two decades of toil, and could lead to India deepening ties with Russia and leveraging BRICS more boldly, a report has said.
The report from One World Outlook warned that the likely outcome is not a dramatic break but greater hedging by India which will look like missed defence deals, slow tech cooperation and a careful refusal to take risks on Washington’s behalf.
A sharp debate in Washington has emerged over this even as Democratic Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove warning President Trump’s tariff regime inflicting "long-term damage” on one of America’s most vital alliances.
Sydney accused PresidentTrump of taking a relationship that the Biden administration had left with a revitalised Quad, a defence tech initiative and supply-chain partnerships – and flushing that progress 'down the toilet', the report said.
Think-tank analysts argued that incremental progress of several years were dragged back into a cycle of grievance and linkage politics.
India is doubling down on diversification, building out BRICS and Global South platforms, signalling interest in alternative payment arrangements, and advertising itself aggressively to European, Japanese and Middle Eastern investors as a manufacturing hub, the report noted.
If Washington insists on framing economic engagement as a stick rather than a carrot, India appears prepared to treat the US as one partner among many, not the privileged one, the report warned.
Beyond recently imposed tariffs, analysts flagged possible secondary sanctions tied to India’s defence and energy ties with Russia. “From Delhi’s perspective, these threats add up to a structural mistrust of Indian strategic autonomy, even as Washington demands India act as a frontline partner in the Indo-Pacific,” the report noted.
The rupture followed US imposition of an additional 25 per cent tariff on Indian imports, raising duties on some products to about 50 per cent and hitting labour-intensive sectors such as textiles, footwear and jewellery.
