Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts
In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum breaks down what he calls “the week of the four scams”—a stunning display of misinformation and corruption from President Donald Trump involving fake trade deals, manipulated markets, and even a personal jet from Qatar.
David is then joined by Indian Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Committee on External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor to examine the recent India-Pakistan cease-fire and just how much (or little) credit the Trump administration can fairly claim for brokering peace.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 6 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
At the very beginning of the first Trump presidency, back in 2017, I posted on Twitter the following thought: “Regular reminder that Donald Trump’s core competency is not dealmaking with powerful counter-parties. It is duping gullible victims.”
That warning has seldom been more needed than it has been needed in the past days, which I call the week of the four scams. Over these past few days, Donald Trump has taken credit or introduced one after another piece of outrageous fiction, which he is presenting to the world as some tremendous achievement. And we need to be warned against it and to protect ourselves against it.
Now, the first of the scams will supply the matter of my main conversation on the program today. That is Donald Trump’s attempt to take credit for the India-Pakistan cease-fire. The India-Pakistan cease-fire is a real event. It actually happened. But Donald Trump’s role in it was negligible, to say the least, as you’ll hear when I speak to my guest today, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, who is chairman of the External Affairs Committee in the Indian Parliament and one of that country’s leading voices for liberal and humane values.
But now let’s talk, in the interval, about the three scams that took place here on the home front. Two of them are the so-called trade deals that Trump has taken credit for: one with Britain, one with China.
Now, these aren’t deals in any traditional sense of the word. A trade agreement must be approved by Congress. It’s a treaty. These are executive announcements, PR, press releases, concepts, plans, projects, noise. They don’t amount to anything. Today, in May, American tariffs are dramatically higher than they were the day before Donald Trump took office. And the effort to make them scale up and to scale down is just a distraction, the way the dealer in a three-card monte game keeps up a line of pattern so that you don’t notice that you are being deceived and robbed.
The fourth of the scams is Donald Trump’s project to accept from the Emirate of Qatar the personal gift of a jet—a jet plane—that would accrue to him personally during his time as president and that would then be kept by him and by his heirs, through the guise of the Trump Library and casino and fast-food restaurant, or whatever he calls it, but nothing that is going to be like any kind of charity. And it looks like the plane will keep operating and be available to him and to his family for use afterwards.
It is the most astonishing act of brazen corruption in the history of the American presidency—in the history of many post-Soviet presidencies. I mean, it’s un-American. It can’t be compared to anything that has ever happened in American history. And it comes on top of the flow of funds to Donald Trump from all over the world via these strange meme coins that he keeps issuing, that someone is buying for no obvious business reason but as a way to direct funds to the pockets of the president.
Let’s talk a little bit more about these two trade deals because there’s going to be an enormous attempt to make them seem real. You know, in a three-card-monte game, and as well as the dealer, there are often people in the crowd who are there to back up the dealer stories, to nudge people away from the tables if they look too closely and to entrap victims. And a lot of the pro-Trump media plays the role of these kinds of ropers and bumpers, as they’re called.
But those even in the independent media, we’re not really very good at saying, This thing the president said, it doesn’t mean anything. All that is happening here is the construction of a new apparatus of taxation that is imposed by the president at the president’s discretion, that can be exempted by the president to people who give them favors or in exchange for various kinds of benefits—all of which is to shift the burden of taxation of the country from those best positioned to pay to those least positioned to pay.
Swirling around all of this commotion, all of this noise, is massive amounts of insider trading. We have had volatility unlike anything seen in financial markets since the great crisis of 2008–09, and people who study the markets notice a lot of short selling and a lot of rapid buying just before the president makes major moves, as if important market players have been tipped off and are making bets in the trillions on which they’re reaping profits in the hundreds of billions. It is just an astonishing thing that is happening.
Meanwhile, the central act is the movement of taxation—because tariffs are taxes—from those best positioned to pay to those leased positioned to pay. A tariff is a tax on goods. It is a tax that falls on the consumer of those goods, and it is a tax on the consumer of anything that has any kind of imported component in it.
Now, maybe a way to think about this is: Imagine a poor family eating a meal at home. Their table is tariffed. Their chairs are tariffed. The plates are tariffed. The knives and forks are tariffed. If they’re having a frugal meal of pasta or spaghetti, the Canadian wheat that probably is the major ingredient in that pasta—that’s tariffed too. Now imagine a wealthier family enjoying a meal in a restaurant, perhaps to celebrate the enormous reduction in their taxes that they’re going to get as a result of the Trump tax deal. Now, their tables and their chairs and so forth, the knives and forks—they might be tariffed too, although they probably come from Europe rather than China, so they’ll be tariffed at a lower rate.
The most important cost in a restaurant meal is not the plate, not the chair, not the table, not the knife and fork, not even the food. The most important expenses are the wages of the chef, the wages of the server, and the rent on the space in which the restaurant is located. None of those things are tariffed. They are services, not goods, and so they escape the tax entirely.
Richer people tend to spend more of their income on services than they do on goods. Poorer people spend more on goods than on services. And richer people, of course, can save and invest more of their income, and that escapes tariffs entirely. And the more of the income you spend on the services, the less you pay in tariffs. The working man’s car, that’s tariffed; the rich man’s chauffeur, not tariffed. The poor girl’s dolls, of which she’s allowed so few by the Trump administration—those are tariffed. When the rich family hires a nanny to play dolls with the girls, the nanny salary is not tariffed. Towels are tariffed. Membership in a swimming club, where you use the towel, that’s not tariffed. The doorknob is tariffed, but the doorman on Fifth Avenue: no tariff on him.
It is very important when you listen to the Donald Trump show to keep your eye not on the game, but on the players and what they’re about. And this jet story, this jet scam, is maybe the most revealing thing of all. It is just beyond shameful that such an offer would even get two minutes of consideration.
Look—foreign governments, authoritarian governments, especially those like Qatar, which have these bad ties to Hamas and Iran and which are trying to buy favor in the United States, they’re always approaching people. There’s a whole apparatus of distance to keep things like that away from the president. The president doesn’t normally say no. The president normally never even learns that the offer was made in the first place. But in this case, there are no guardrails and no protections. And so in our fourth scam, the offer comes to the president, and the president wants to say yes.
Now, he may ultimately not be able to say yes. The gift of a jet to the president of the United States personally from a foreign Emirate, that may be too much even for Trump’s usual apologists. But look how far we’ve come. Look how low we’ve sunk. It’s a shame. It’s a scandal. And the test for all of us is whether we can keep our eye on the main thing and to keep being shocked by things that are shocking.
And now my discussion with Dr. Shashi Tharoor. But first a quick break.
[Music]
Frum: A terrorist outrage in Kashmir killed some 25 Indians on April 22. India and Pakistan have since mutually retaliated one upon the other. As we record this dialogue on the morning of Sunday, May 11, in Washington—the evening of Sunday, May 11, in the subcontinent—a cease-fire has taken hold. To discuss the very distressing and worrying events in the subcontinent, I’m very proud and pleased to be joined by Dr. Sashi Tharoor.
To say Shashi Tharoor is an author and a member of the Indian Parliament is accurate so far as it goes but inadequate to the reality. His books have been massive sellers in India and the United Kingdom, and have had a great influence on all debate about Indian politics. He himself occupies a very important place as a politician that goes beyond the merely parliamentary. In a country where politics has for a long time been drifting in sectarian and authoritarian directions, Dr. Tharoor’s public advocacy and political work elevate him as one of India’s preeminent voices for secular and liberal politics.
A graduate of the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, here in the United States, Dr. Tharoor spent much of his early career working in international organizations. He rose to be undersecretary general of the United Nations. In 2009, he was entered into Indian electoral politics and was elected to Parliament. He has been reelected three subsequent times, for a total of four—an unbroken career of success. He now heads the Parliamentary Committee on [External] Affairs in the Indian Parliament.
Thank you so much for joining us today at this time of tension. Maybe you can begin by talking about the cease-fire. A cease-fire has taken hold. The Trump administration claims a lot of credit for brokering it. Do they deserve that credit?
Shashi Tharoor: We were all a bit puzzled by President Trump’s posts on Truth Social and on X, because India has historically been allergic to mediation. It doesn’t believe it needs it, and it’s unlikely to have invited mediation in a formal sense. On the other hand, it’s true that the U.S. administration—in particular, Secretary of State and now also National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and, to some degree, Vice President Vance—have been speaking to Indian officials, as indeed, Indian officials have acknowledged. The foreign minister’s tweets will tell us about these calls.
But it’s one thing for the Indian foreign minister to say to the Americans, Look—if the Pakistanis do this, we will do that. Or if they hit us, we are going to hit them harder back, and quite another for the foreign minister to say, Would you mind relaying this message to the Pakistanis? India would never do the latter. They would do the former, and I think what happened then, perhaps, is that Rubio then called the Pakistanis and said, Look—I’ve been talking to the Indians, and this is what they’re saying, so you might want to take this into account. And would you not like to move in a different direction? That kind of thing.
The initial Trump announcement gave the impression that the Americans and Indians and Pakistanis have been pulling an all-nighter, discussing everything jointly. That simply hasn’t happened. And I think that’s a misrepresentation of what role the U.S. played. But I certainly don’t want to sound ungrateful for anybody who is willing to pull the Pakistanis down off the escalatory ladder that they had climbed onto.
There was a terrorist outrage in India. India chose to react in a very careful, calculated, calibrated, and precise way only against terrorist infrastructure. It didn’t strike any Pakistani military installations or any civilian nor governmental installations, and basically signaled, Look—we are only after terrorists, and we did this strike at 1:30 in the morning so there wouldn’t be too many civilians about. We want to avoid all collateral damage. It was a very responsible strike that the Indians conducted.
The Pakistanis chose to react with unnecessary escalation. They shelled very heavily civilian and occupied civilian inhabited areas of India, killing 22 civilians and hospitalizing a further 59 in the district of Poonch in Kashmir. And frankly, India had to respond—and did—very, very strongly. And when India responded, it also attacked places it had so far kept off limits. It hit Pakistani air bases, for example, very hard. Pakistan has, because there are no terrorist infrastructure in India to attack—Pakistan was assaulting Indian cities where ordinary human beings live. And that was simply unacceptable. We were able to use our air-defense shield to stop that, but we hit the Pakistanis hard where it hurt.
Now, this escalation was leading nowhere for nobody. As far as India was concerned, they delivered their message to the terrorists. They were willing to stop. As far as Pakistan was concerned, they didn’t know when to say that their honor was satisfied. And if the U.S. helped them to step off that ladder, the U.S. gave them an excuse to climb down off it, so much the better, because India had no interest in a prolonged war.
What was very clear from the manner of the Indian strike to begin with, David, was that India was trying to signal from the very start: This is not the opening salvo in a long conflict. This is just a one-off retaliation to a terror attack, period. Nothing else. It’s Pakistan that was taking it in the wrong direction, and I’m glad that stopped right now.
Frum: Well, let me ask you more about this American mediation. You’ll remember that in 2001 there [was], again, another outrage against India. [Former Secretary of State] Colin Powell personally inserted himself and worked very hard, deployed a lot of threats, actually, against the Pakistanis to bring about a cease-fire in 2008 after the terror attack in Mumbai, another outrage on Indian soil. [Former Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice was in person in the subcontinent and flew back and forth.
That’s what American mediation has looked like in the past, from our point of view. And not to make this story about the United States when it’s a story about the people of the subcontinent, but it does look like the Trump administration showed up, took credit for something that had already happened, and now its main interest seems to be not a structure of peace but scoring some Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Donald Trump.
Tharoor: (Laughs.) Oh, you said it, David. I didn’t, and I probably would be unwise to say very much along those lines myself. I will say that mediation is possibly the wrong word. Mediation implies a request by both parties to be involved. In the two examples you gave, and a third example—the 1999 Kargil conflict, when President Clinton summoned the prime minister of Pakistan to Washington and told him to lay off, which he did—all those three cases were essentially the U.S. putting pressure on the Pakistanis, who in every case were in the wrong. They were the perpetrators of terror. They were the perpetrators of violence. And in the case of Kargil, they were the ones who had led an invasion of Indian territory. So in all those cases, the U.S. was telling one side.
I would say that in this particular instance, in as much as there was any strong American messaging coming, it was almost certainly directed principally to the Pakistanis, because India at no stage wanted to prolong a war. See, India, David, is a status-quo power. It is a country that basically would be very happy to be left alone. There’s nothing Pakistan has that we want. We would be very happy to focus on our own growth, our own development, the well-being and prosperity of our own people. We are a high-tech economy, moving in that direction. We are trying to find a way forward in the 21st century. We are already the world’s fifth-largest economy in dollar terms, and in purchasing-power-parity terms are third-largest. So that’s where our ambitions and aspirations are.
We don’t want to get bogged down into a meaningless war with a bunch of Islamist fanatics whose lust for our territory is what motivates them. When you are a status-quo power, what you want to do is to just continue with the way things are. Next door to us, unfortunately, is a revisionist power—a power that is not happy with the existing states of regional geopolitics and wants to upend it, and that’s what the Pakistanis, sadly, are.
So they couldn’t do it by conventional means. They kept losing formal wars against us. So from 1989 onwards, having learned an unfortunate lesson from the success of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, from Pakistani soil, the Pakistanis decided to turn that technique against us. And they started unleashing mujahideen by various names and various terror organizations, front organizations, into Indian territory to wreak havoc against innocent Indian civilians. They’ve been doing that since 1989. This is year 36 of Pakistani terrorism. You can understand that we really have lost patience with this.
Frum: One last question about the American role, because when you line up—and I should have mentioned—in 1999, 2001, 2008 and you see the pattern of the American involvement there, and then you contrast it with the pattern of American involvement in 2025, it does really look like the United States is a receding power in the world that mattered much more a quarter century ago than it does now, and that the Trump administration seems to want the accolades that it would get domestically from the assertion of great power status. But actually, it has given away that status, and maybe by its own neglect, maybe by some objective reality.
Tharoor: Yeah, and there was some slightly confused messaging also coming out of all of this that the first statements of Mr. Trump were that, Oh, these Indians and Pakistanis have been fighting for thousands of years, which is slightly odd because Pakistan has only existed for 77 years as a country. So they haven’t fought anybody for a century, let alone centuries or thousands of years.
Then we had Mr. Vance saying, Oh, we have no business in this fight. Let them sort it out themselves. And then suddenly, within a day or two of these remarks, the same two people are taking credit for the cease-fire. I’m at a bit of a loss, frankly, about what they did. Certainly, there is no independent confirmation from the Indian side of any successful or serious negotiating effort by the U.S. here.
It’s possible that they did this with the Pakistanis, and we might learn more from the U.S.—there’s always stories coming out in the U.S. media from reliable sources in Washington as to what exactly America did with Pakistan. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough. But for now, I am at a bit of a loss, to answer your question, David. But the desire for accolades without too much of effort is a human foible, isn’t it? It’s something which too many people tend to want to do.
Frum: It runs stronger in some human beings than in others. In a few, it’s the overwhelming passion of life.
Let me ask you: You alluded, I think, a little bit to what will be your answer to this question, but why is it so hard to reach an enduring peace in the subcontinent? The one smidgen of truth in Donald Trump’s post about a thousand years is: For a thousand years, Hindu majority and Muslim majority—Hindu-ruled and Muslim-ruled—states have coexisted peacefully and successfully in the subcontinent. Why can’t they do so now?
Tharoor: Well, I mean, that’s the irony of all of this. I mean, it’s utter nonsense to imply that there is a thousand-year battle between Hindus and Muslims. On the contrary, every great Hindu king had Muslim soldiers and generals on his side. Every great Muslim king had Hindu generals and soldiers on his side. And the two communities have coexisted ever since the advent of Islam on the Indian subcontinent, which was within a century after the birth of the prophets. Indeed, in my own state of Kerala, Islam came peacefully through traders and merchants bringing it as news from the Arab world rather than coming as some sort of foreign conquest.
So there’s been a long and complicated history. But it’s not all been hostile. The British during the colonial regime chose a very deliberate and deliberately militant policy of “divide and rule,” where they actively fomented a distinctive Muslim identity as distinct from, a separate from a Hindu identity in order to prevent the two uniting against the British, as they had done in the revolt of 1857, when Hindus and Muslims alike rose up in arms against British rule. It was ruthlessly suppressed. The British butchered 150,000 civilians in Delhi alone in putting down that revolt.
And then they adopted a conscious policy of divide and rule. Divide and rule meant that when the Indian National Congress was established as a representative body of Indian nationalists—in those days, very decorous Indian nationalist agitation for rights and political rights in India against the British—the British actually paid to establish a rival Muslim organization, called the Muslim League, in order to undermine the Indian National Congress.
Finally, partition happened. Pakistan was carved out of the stooped shoulders of India by the departing British in 1947. And ever since, it has had to justify its existence as a separate country by an increasingly belligerent Islamism. This is why Pakistan was not only the source of these horrific attacks, such as the 26/11 attack, to which you alluded to—the butchery of 166 innocent people in Mumbai in 2008, all the earlier attacks on the Indian Parliament, the invasion of Kargil, and so on—but Pakistan was also the place that sheltered and protected Osama bin Laden for many years, until, as you know, he was found living in a safe house right near a Pakistani army encampment. This is Pakistan’s history.
It is a country that has, unfortunately, armed, trained, equipped, guided, and directed terrorism from its soil for decades as an instrument of state policy. It is a malcontented state that wants territory that India controls and that it can’t have. It is a bigoted state that believes that all Muslims belong to it, so that the first loyalty of Muslims, even in India, should be to Pakistan, which—I’m sorry—is never going to be the case.
It was very striking that one of the daily briefings that were being done by the Indian military featured an Indian woman colonel who was a Muslim. It was a very powerful message that India stood united. It was not about Hindu, Muslim. It was all about India standing united against terror.
Pakistan doesn’t understand that, because their state is built on a totally different set of premises. It’s also, to paraphrase Voltaire on Prussia, a situation where India is a state that has an army; Pakistan is an army that has a state. And that army really controls the state, runs the state, controls the largest share of that country’s GDP and governmental budget—larger than any army of any country in the world controls of its GDP and national budget. So for the army to continue its disproportionate dominance of Pakistan, it needs to be able to have enough external demons, in addition to the demons it has nurtured in its own backyard, in order to be able to point to the fact that it is the sole savior of its people.
It’s a very, very sad and pathetic story. The Osama bin Laden story was merely the tip of a very, very large mountain, I’m afraid, of this kind of thing. Hillary Clinton, rather memorably, said as secretary of state, when Pakistan tried to plead victim about its own terrorist problems with a group called the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, initially created by Pakistan, but which has deemed Pakistan to be insufficiently Islamist to its taste and that has turned out to be attacking Pakistan’s military and political institutions—Hillary Clinton said, Well, if you nurture vipers in your backyard, some of them would turn around and bite you. And I think that was absolutely the right metaphor. That’s what Pakistan has done. Vipers in your backyard is really a case of—to mix up the animals—the chickens coming home to roost in Pakistan.
Very sad story, but that’s the problem we are living with next-door to us.
Frum: Pakistan is ideologically committed to the conflict, for reasons you described, but the wealth gap between India and Pakistan has been growing and growing and growing. Presumably, the power gap follows, although India has historically had difficulty turning wealth into power, for reasons you may want to explain.
At some point, you would say, However ideologically committed you are to this conflict, it’s not working, so peace becomes your logical outcome. But in the subcontinent, as indeed in the Israeli conflict with the various anti-Israel rejectionist groups around Israel, the logic of power that political scientists would predict doesn’t seem to work. Why does it not work between Pakistan and India, where they say, You know what? We’ve just lost too many times.
Tharoor: Yeah, but you’ve left out a very important force, unfortunately, in this equation, and that is China. China is sitting on our northern borders, nibbling away at our land. They have a long-standing frontier dispute with India. And Pakistan has been reduced to a client state of China over the years.
China’s single-largest project under its Belt and Road Initiative is a massive highway through Pakistan called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is of inestimable economic value to China because goods coming from the Suez Canal and from the Gulf countries can now be offloaded at the Port of Gwadar—in the southwestern tip of Pakistan, in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province—and transported on this Chinese-built highway all the way directly into western China. Whereas in the past, and right up to then, these goods had to go all the way around India, through the Strait of Malacca, into the South China Sea, be offloaded in ports like Guangzhou, in southeastern China, and then transported laboriously overland all the way across to western China.
They save 90 percent of the cost and 95 percent of the time by just being able to use Pakistan as a conduit for their goods into western China. So China has a huge interest in keeping Pakistan safe and secure and an obedient vessel state, which Pakistan is, indeed, happy to be. And China also has its own problems with India, which it would dearly like to cut down to size as a potential geopolitical rival in the area.
So when you talk about the power gap between India and Pakistan, the difficulty we have is: We have two fronts we need to be worried about. We have a Pakistan front and a China front. And cumulatively, I’m sorry to say, we are not in a position, most unfortunately, to fight a two-front war. So we have a very complicated mix of diplomatic, military, and geopolitical calculations to make every time Pakistan triggers a problem with us. We’ve got to make sure we hit Pakistan hard so that they learn a lesson, but we also have to make sure we don’t go to such a point that China feels obliged to come directly to Pakistan’s rescue.
The overwhelming majority of Pakistani weaponry—which means, I believe, as high as 90-odd percent of Pakistani weaponry—comes from China. That includes China’s latest 4.5 generation J-10[C] fighter aircraft, their PL-15 missiles, and various other kinds of ammunition. So India’s problem is that it is essentially having to juggle a number of geopolitical, diplomatic, as well as military considerations when it reacts to Pakistani provocations.
We want to send the terrorists a message. We want to hit back whenever Pakistan hits us, but we don’t want to get to a situation where we might end up, quite frankly, provoking a more direct Chinese involvement, because India is not particularly keen on entering into a two-front war with both Pakistan and China.
So it’s a complication. When you look at the power asymmetry, as you mentioned, you are not just comparing India and Pakistan; you’re comparing India against both Pakistan and China, and then the comparison doesn’t look that good for India.
Frum: But as China has colonized Pakistan in this way over the past generation, a succession of American presidents—starting with Bill Clinton, developing very rapidly under George W. Bush (the president for whom I worked), under President Obama a little maybe less energetically—have sought to build an American-Indian partnership that is closer and closer. And there are a lot of difficulties in the way of this, but there has been effort very much on the U.S. side, a little more doubt on the Indian side.
President Trump has just slammed India with a whole new set of punitive tariffs, undercutting all the fine things that he and his vice president say about India. How would you assess the state of that U.S.-India partnership so founded by Bill Clinton and nurtured by W. Bush and President Obama.
Tharoor: Well, you know, and even in the first Trump administration, it was going fine. I mean, I would’ve said that, in many ways, the India-U.S. relationship was above partisan politics, that it certainly transcends the political divide within India, and appeared to have transcended the political divide of the U.S.—because both Bush and Clinton, both Obama and Trump 1.0 all supported a very close relationship.
But everything has become very confused in Trump 2.0. There have been the tariffs, which certainly have hurt India quite significantly. There have been the very, very stringent policies with regard to immigration—including legal immigration, H-1B visas, spouse reunions, and so on—which tends disproportionately to hit Indian techies who provide a lot of IT services in the U.S. and who obviously want their families to join them and so on, who are going to find that challenging.
But even more, Mr. Trump’s statement yesterday and today has been very troubling because it de facto handed Pakistan a victory that Pakistan has not earned. By choosing unnecessarily to imply an equivalence between India and Pakistan, it was equating the victim and the perpetrator. By speaking in terms of getting the two to sit down together and talk to end their thousands of years of conflict, apart from the fact that it hasn’t been thousands of years, there is a fact that we are certainly not going to give Pakistan the satisfaction of earning negotiating rights at the point of a gun. We are not going to talk to the Pakistanis after what they have done to us by killing innocent civilians. And I’m sorry—if that’s what Mr. Trump wants, he’s not going to get it.
Thirdly, he has given the Pakistanis the victory of re-internationalizing the Kashmir dispute, which had been off the international agenda for quite some time, and he has done India the grave disservice of re-hyphenating India and Pakistan in the American imagination, which had been de-hyphenated since the days of Clinton. You will notice, David, that since the days of President Clinton, no American president has actually visited both countries on the same trip. They have very deliberately sent a signal that India is a country you deal with in its own right. It’s not something we twin with Pakistan in the American imagination.
Sadly, Mr. Trump’s post has done all of these four things, and I think it shows that he has not yet been rather well briefed. What’s striking is that he has named a proposed assistant secretary of state for South Asia who is a very knowledgeable scholar about South Asia and about India, and who is himself partly of Indian American origin, and who would, I believe, know far better than to say the kinds of things that President Trump has said on Truth Social—which are, in that sense, an embarrassment to the last quarter century of American policy. It has really upended all of these fundamental assumptions of the U.S.-India relationship.
Frum: Now, let me ask you a question about—speaking about Indian in its own right—about Indian domestic politics. The political tradition from which you come and, indeed, your life’s work has been to speak for India as a nonsectarian state, a state of Muslim and Sikh and other minorities. And I will note here for those who—you will know this history, but—many forget that the Indian army that liberated Bangladesh in 1971 was led by a Jewish officer, which is a detail that is often forgotten.
Tharoor: Yeah. Not led; it was more complicated. We had—the army was commanded by a Parsi Zoroastrian, the tiny minority. The general officer commanding the Eastern command, the forces that marched into Bangladesh, was a Sikh. The vice chief of the air staff was a Muslim. And the major general who was helicoptered into Dakar to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani army at the end of that war was Jewish. Major General J. F. R. Jacob was a friend of mine, a remarkable gentleman, now no longer with us. But that was India, David. That’s what India is all about. It’s just a country of such immense diversity that it really is a microcosm of all that’s fine about pluralism as a social construct.
Frum: That said, over the past decade and a half, India has emigrated away from that tradition to a great extent. And you see a rise of sectarian and authoritarian politics in India. And I don’t say this to cast aspersions. We have seen it in the United States. Why should you be any different from the rest of the world? But it has become to the point where people sometimes fear India becoming a Hindu Pakistan—chauvinist, sectarian, authoritarian. How worried should we be? How strong are the forces of opposition to the tendency? And the last question—maybe we can break this into a separate part: How is this affecting the way the authoritarian and sectarian elements in the United States think about India?
Tharoor: Okay, so first of all, as far as India’s concerned: I mean, this is a battle we fight daily on our own soil. And I have been—I hope I’m acknowledged as—being a very strong voice against sectarian tendencies in our politics. I believe strongly and passionately that every Indian has the same rights as every other Indian and that their religion, their language, their ethnicity, their color, the region or the state they come from have absolutely no bearing on their rights as an Indian and their contributions to this great country.
And in many ways, my notion of Indianness is comparable to most Americans’ idea of civic nationalism in America, where you all belong and you’re sheltered by this collective identity. You can be Jewish. You can be—whatever—Californian. You could be Hungarian speaking, whatever. But you are who you are because being American makes it possible. And it’s the same for us in India. And you can be a good Muslim, a good Gujarati, and a good Indian all at once because that Indianness is what protects your ability to be all of that. And I fought for that idea, and I will do so till my last breath.
But having said that, when it comes to something like a conflict with Pakistan, it’s very interesting how quickly some of these divisions in our internal domestic politics disappear. And as I mentioned to you, the striking sight in the daily briefings of an Indian woman military officer who is a Muslim sent a very powerful message, both at home and abroad: This is who we are. That’s not who we are, not the guys across the border with their sectarian bigotry. And to my mind, that was actually a very welcome reminder.
The second paradox, David, is that this government—despite the fact that it has presided over some of the worst tendencies of bigotry and encouraged intolerance within Indian society—has actually been a remarkably good government when it comes to strengthening India’s relations with the Arab and Muslim world. It’s quite astonishing to see, for example, the closeness of India’s relations with Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. and Egypt, all of which have never been better. And it’s striking that’s happening on the watch of a government that domestically has been rightly criticized for some of its statements and actions with regard to the Muslim minority.
So there is hope yet. I do believe that we are going through a certain churn in our politics. You are quite right that it’s reminiscent in many ways of what we’re seeing around the world—the same degree of xenophobia and rejection of the “people not like us” kind of thing that you’ve seen in the U.S., in Brexit in Britain, in Hungary, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, and so on. Right across the world, there’ve been a lot of these tendencies, and we’re seeing it rising in many parts of liberal Western Europe with the rise of AfD in Germany or the equivalent party in Austria. There have been suddenly elements given a free reign to say, We are more authentic representatives of the country than these people who worship foreign gods and speak foreign tongues. And that sort of thing, I’m afraid, is what has also been rising in India.
But I do believe that liberal, pluralistic, humane values have not been snuffed out. We are going to continue to keep them aloft in my country.
Frum: Well, you’ll remember the Howdy Modi event in Houston, Texas, where in Trump’s first term—
Tharoor: Right.
Frum: —where he gave a very personal greeting to Prime Minister Modi, of a kind that previous American presidents have tried absolutely to subordinate—to say, This is not a personal relationship. It’s: Bush Clinton doesn’t matter; whoever is the head of government in India doesn’t matter. This is a national, nation-to-nation, people-to-people relationship.
But there do seem to be elements in the Trump administration (the vice president is one) that—I don’t want to overstate this, but—seem to be indicating that a more Hindu, chauvinist India is what they want, just the way they want to see neo-Nazis or neofascists prevail in many European countries. And I know you’re speaking to an American audience, and you want to preserve national unity, but can you talk a little bit about, from an American point of view: Are they right that the United States would be better off with a more Hindu, chauvinist India?
Tharoor: Look—I don’t think the U.S. would be better off with one or the other kind of group in India. I think that the U.S.—this particular administration—may be equally comfortable with people of that persuasion. Whereas arguably, someone like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would not have been comfortable with a more explicitly sectarian Indian government.
In fact, Obama made a famous speech in Delhi calling for greater religious tolerance at a time when Mr. Modi’s government was still pretty new. So there is a difference, yes, in your domestic politics between a more liberal government and a government that considers itself more conservative. But ultimately, I still would like to believe, David, that this relationship is above and beyond that—that if tomorrow, a more liberal Indian dispensation came to power, that there would still be enough forces in America that would want to preserve a good relationship with it.
One factor, undoubtedly, is the extraordinary influence of the Indian American diaspora. It’s now 3.4 million strong, which is, oh, a good 1 percent of your population, heading a little above 1 percent. And these are people with a tremendous contribution being made to America. They have the largest single median income of any ethnic group, higher than Japanese Americans, higher than white Americans. They’re making significant contributions in a number of cutting-edge sectors. They’re technologists. They’re computer geeks. They’re doctors and medical people. They’re bio-technologists. They do all sorts of things in fields that America values.
They’ve not only done all of that—they’ve also got involved in your politics. There are Indian Americans among top fundraisers going back to George Bush Sr., whose leading fundraiser was an Indian American dentist in Florida. You’ve had Indian Americans on the campaign trail. You’ve had Indian Americans getting elected to office. Nikki Haley is an Indian American. Bobby Jindal is an Indian American. And of course, there will be more. There are half a dozen people of Indian origin in the U.S. Congress right now, today—six of them.
So you’re looking at a community that’s not only made a valuable contribution to America but that is visible, is active, is engaged in your social and political life, and therefore cannot be ignored. By extension, the country they came from and still in many cases care about cannot be ignored. Just as, you know, Jewish Americans have an impact on America’s policy towards Israel, I expect Indian Americans to continue to have an impact on America’s policy towards India.
And I believe that will be the case, whoever forms the government in India. I may be wrong, David. We’ll find out the hard way. But as of now, the changing complexion of Indian politics may not make such a difference to the U.S. attitude to India, because there are now more and more sort of permanent structural factors sustaining that relationship, including the presence and role of the Indian diaspora in America.
Frum: Will the cease-fire hold?
Tharoor: I think so, yes. I don’t really think that Pakistan has much to gain from starting a new misadventure, because India has been able to demonstrate that they can hit very hard. They’ve destroyed the runway in a major air base, called the Rahim Yar Khan Air Base, and have severely damaged another air base, the Air Marshal Nur Khan Air Base, which is right next to Pakistani military headquarters GHQ Rawalpindi, not far from the capital of the country. So I think it’s been a sobering wake up to the Pakistanis that this is not an adversary you want to monkey around with.
Now, did they achieve their goals? Partially, yes. And Mr. Trump’s statement would be cause of rejoicing in Islamabad, that, Look—we are back on the map with the U.S. They’re treating us as the equal of the Indians. So they might feel that, Look—we pulled off something very good by doing what we did. I don’t think they would see a reason now to get back again to the battlefield and possibly risk further defeat and further opprobrium.
They would actually feel they’ve actually pulled off something here. So I think not, and as far as India’s concerned, India has never been the belligerent, has no interest, whatever, in initiating conflict, and ideally wants to be left alone by Pakistan to get on with its own business and focus on its economy.
So for all these reasons, I believe the cease-fire could hold, can hold, should be holding. But it’s not even 24 hours yet. And in fact, on the first day of the cease-fire—which in our time zone, it’s yesterday evening—I’m afraid the Pakistanis violated it in three places by sending missiles across to Indian cities, hitting civilian targets, homes, and cars. We were able to stop many of those missiles, but we did take a few blows. And we hit back, as well, in retaliation.
So the message is very clear, David. If the Pakistanis can’t curb their hot heads and if they fire at us, we will fire back, and we will fire back very hard. But if they are able to curb their worst instincts and behave and actually hold their fire, we have no intention whatsoever of initiating any action. We would like the peace to hold, and we’d like to get on with our lives.
Frum: Thank you so much for making the time for us today.
Tharoor: Thank you, David. Really good speaking to you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks to Dr. Tharoor for joining me on the program. Because of the substance and length of our discussion today, we’ll omit the viewer-question part of the program this week. I hope you will send questions for next week’s programs to [email protected], and I hope you’ll join us again next week for the next episode of The David From Show.
Remember, if you like what you hear at the on The David Frum Show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at theatlantic.com/listener. That’s theatlantic.com/listener. And please like, subscribe, rate, review, share it any way you can, the content of this program, if you enjoy it and find it a value. We are already past in our first five episodes 1.5 million views and downloads on video and audio platforms. We hope to keep growing. We need your help to do that. So please rate, review, like, subscribe, share in any way you can, and subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/listener.
Thank you. I’m David Frum. See you next week.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
The post The Trump Grift Machine appeared first on The Atlantic.
