US President Donald Trump's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, strongly rebuked India for what he termed as an "opportunistic" acquisition of Russian crude oil and encouraged New Delhi to be a genuine strategic ally of the United States.
In a Monday column for The Financial Times, White House trade and manufacturing counsellor Navarro accused India of acting as a world clearinghouse for Russian oil, processing embargoed crude into high-value exports.
"India's Russian crude reliance is opportunistic and corrosively undermining the world's attempt to isolate Putin's war economy," Navarro wrote.
"Effectively, India serves as a world clearinghouse for Russian oil, turning embargoed crude into high-value exports and providing Moscow with the dollars it requires," he added.
Navarro put the issue as one of the "mathematics" of the relationship between Russia and India, observing that American consumers buy Indian products, and the ensuing dollars are used to purchase Russian crude at discounted rates.
"Russian crude is refined and resold throughout the globe by Indian profiteers hand in hand with mute Russian collaborators — while Russia gains hard currency to fuel its war machine in Ukraine. With Russia continuing to pound Ukraine, aided by the economic support from India, American (and European) taxpayers are then compelled to shell out tens of billions more to aid Ukraine's defense.". While that's happening, India continues to shut the door on American exports with prohibitively high tariffs and trade barriers," he said.
Navarro also chastised India for applying some of the world's highest average tariffs, as well as many non-tariff barriers, which he asserts "punish" American workers and businesses.
Thus, the US has a huge trade deficit with India, approaching USD 50 billion per year. And here's the punchline: India is using that US trade dollars to purchase Russian oil," he further stated.
The increase in India's crude imports since February 2022 is not based on domestic requirements but on the "profiteering" of the "Big Oil lobby" of the country, according to Navarro.
Refining units have made India a giant refining complex for cheap Russian crude. The refineries purchase the oil at a heavy discount, refine it, and then sell refined fuels to Europe, Africa, and Asia — all the while protecting India from sanctions attention under the cover of neutrality," he wrote.
In defending Trump's new executive order imposing heavy tariffs on India, Navarro also accused India of continuing to curtail American exports through trade restrictions. He added that even though Delhi increasingly buys defense equipment from the US, France, and Israel, such deals are usually accompanied by strings.
“The Trump administration is confronting it. A recent executive order issued by the President will impose a 25 per cent national security tariff on Indian goods to address the threat posed by India’s continued importation of Russian oil. This new tariff is in addition to the 25 per cent reciprocal tariff already in place,” Navarro stated.
This double-barrelled policy will target India where it hurts — its access to US markets — even as it aims to sever the financial lifeline it has provided to Russia's war machine. If India wants to be treated like a strategic partner of the US, it has to begin behaving like one.
Trump has now slapped tariffs worth 50 percent on India, of which 25 percent pertains to its Russian oil imports, which will be effective from August 27.
India, in turn, labelled the tariffs as unreasonable and unfounded, highlighting that, being a large economy like any other, it will do everything needed to defend its economic security and national interests.
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