A stunned South Block was grappling for a response on Thursday as US President Donald Trump’s tirade lasted over 12 hours after announcing a 25% tariff against India, plus a “penalty” for its trade with Russia, from August 1.

The sharp words on India where President Trump lashed out at New Delhi’s close ties with Russia — “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care” — was seen as offensive by many.

While his criticism of India putting high tariffs has been a pet grievance from his first term, when he had called India a “tariff king”, the US President’s latest statement described India’s trade policies as “most strenuous and obnoxious”.

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Trump also said that although India is America’s friend, “we have, over the years, done relatively little business with them because their (India) tariffs are far too high, among the highest in the world, and they have the most strenuous and obnoxious non-monetary trade barriers of any country”. He said India has always purchased a significant amount of military equipment and energy products from Russia at a time when everyone wants Moscow to stop the “killing” in Ukraine.

What added insult to injury was that Trump announced sealing a trade deal with Pakistan and said Washington will work with Islamabad to develop what he described as the South Asian nation’s “massive oil reserves”.

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In a social media post, the US President also wondered if Pakistan could sell oil to India “some day”. “We are in the process of choosing the oil company that will lead this (US-Pakistan) partnership. Who knows, maybe they’ll be selling oil to India some day!” he said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday.

There has been no official response from the Indian government after the barrage of posts.

There are two possible impulses that guide Trump’s responses, according to Delhi’s analysis.

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First, his negotiating style to browbeat and bully the adversary by imposing high tariffs. This has been seen with China, where he imposed 145% tariffs and then dialled down to 35%. The dialing down of tariffs took place after their talks in Geneva.

Second, some in the Indian establishment feel that the US President has not taken very kindly to Delhi fact-checking Trump’s claims on brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. Not only has Prime Minister Narendra Modi conveyed this in the phone call with President Trump on June 17, but Indian ministers and officials have repeatedly denied the US President’s claim.

New Delhi feels that Trump’s words now threaten to undo the hard work that had made the two countries “strategic partners” and had been framed as the “defining partnership of the 21st century” by US President Barack Obama.

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Veteran Indian diplomats recall how India and the US were estranged during the Cold War era, and India had faced sanctions from the US, especially after the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998.

The turnaround in the relationship took place with President George W Bush agreeing with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to turn the corner and work on the Next Steps of Strategic Partnership. That laid the foundation for the Indo-US nuclear deal under Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, and later Prime Minister Narendra Modi built on the foundation to move the relations to higher levels — from Quad leaders’ summit to Major Defence partnership.

Trump, in the first term, had also supported India against China during the border standoffs in Doklam in 2017 and eastern Ladakh since 2020. He also conveyed full-fledged support after the 2019 Pulwama terror attack.

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In fact, he was the first foreign leader to call PM Modi in Jeddah after the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22. The US also listed The Resistance Front as a foreign terrorist outfit.

But, Pakistan’s outreach to the Trump family and the inner circle through investments in the crypto-currency business, Delhi feels, seems to have tilted the scales in its favour.

Over the last few months, business deals and fawning praise for Trump, including recommending his name for the Nobel peace prize for stopping the India-Pakistan military confrontation, also seem to have brought Islamabad closer to Washington DC. The icing on the cake was Trump hosting Pakistan Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir for lunch at the White House days before the US dropped bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

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Delhi has watched the US-Pakistan reset with a fair amount of concern, as it has been completely blindsided in the last few months. Indian diplomats recall how Pakistan’s strong defence relationship with the US, when it got top-of-the-line equipment including F-16 jets, had created so much mistrust in the past.

Now, Pakistan’s oil deal with the US has cemented the belief in Delhi that the Trump-Munir lunch had much more on the menu than was previously known and understood.

Pakistan has long claimed to have large oil deposits along its coast, but no progress has been made to tap those deposits. The country currently imports oil from the Middle East to meet its energy demands.

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Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif took to social media on Thursday to thank President Trump over the “historic” trade agreement. “I wish to convey my profound thanks to President Trump @realDonaldTrump for his leadership role in finalization of the historic US-Pakistan trade agreement, successfully concluded by our two sides in Washington, last night,” he wrote on X. “This landmark deal will enhance our growing cooperation so as to expand the frontiers of our enduring partnership in days to come,” he said.

While the Indian government’s Commerce Ministry said it has “taken note” of Trump’s statement on bilateral trade and the government is studying its implications, sources said that any response has to be shorn of emotion and calculated.

The diplomatic challenge is three-fold: how long can Delhi stand its ground against the US, whether India can engage with Trump’s inner circle and whether they can overcome the distrust fuelled by the US President’s comments in the long term.