Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sunday that the Trump administration remained committed to a strategic partnership with India, apparently trying to defuse tensions from President Trump’s aggressive actions in the past year against India and Indians living in the United States.
“The U.S.-India relationship has not lost any momentum,” he said in a news conference in New Delhi on the second day of a four-day trip to India. “The relationship continues to be strong.”
Mr. Rubio, who has met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other officials on the trip, said the United States wants to continue working with India on trade and investment in advanced technologies.
And he said Mr. Trump’s efforts to impose tariffs on Indian imports to the United States — a 50 percent in initial salvos last summer — were not aimed at India specifically but were part of a global effort to create better balances of trade for the United States.
The tariffs are a tax paid by American companies that import goods from India.
“There’s a huge imbalance that’s built up and it needs to be addressed,” Mr. Rubio said of global trade. “This is not about India,” he added.
But the high tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump came after Mr. Modi refused to nominate the American president for a Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Trump has insisted that he played a crucial role in getting India and Pakistan to reach a cease-fire after each country carried out deadly military strikes against the other.
After that refusal, Mr. Trump acted quickly against India with tariffs, The New York Times reported.
The two countries reached an interim trade agreement in February with onerous terms for India. Then the Supreme Court struck down Mr. Trump’s tariffs on more than 100 countries. The president is still trying to impose such taxes through alternative means.
Mr. Trump’s actions have upended more than two decades of U.S. policy toward India. From the early 2000s until now, Republican and Democratic administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first one, sought to forge closer ties with India, the world’s most populous nation.
Mr. Rubio said on Sunday that commercial partnerships between Indian and the United States were a cornerstone of their relationship, which he called “a strategic alliance.”
Standing next to Mr. Rubio, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the foreign secretary of India, said, “the Trump administration has been very forthright in putting forward its foreign policy as ‘America First.’” He added, “We have a view of ‘India First.’”
Mr. Rubio flew into India on Saturday after attending a meeting of foreign ministers of NATO member countries in Sweden the previous day. He visited Mother Teresa’s charity in Kolkata before going to Delhi.
There, Mr. Rubio delivered an invitation from Mr. Trump for Mr. Modi to visit the White House.
In a summary of the meeting between Mr. Rubio and Mr. Modi, the State Department said they discussed trade and defense cooperation and the need to resolve the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
One question that looms over Mr. Rubio’s visit in India is Mr. Trump’s intentions toward Xi Jinping, the leader of China.
Those two leaders showered each other with flattery at a summit in Beijing last week; Mr. Trump said they would “have a fantastic future together.”
For many Indians, even more troubling is Mr. Trump’s recent praise of Pakistani leaders, who have been mediators in the Iran war.
When asked about ties between Washington and Islamabad, Mr. Rubio said, “I don’t view our relation with any country in the world as coming at the expense of our strategic alliance with India.”
Indians are also concerned over recent anti-immigration moves by Mr. Trump, and in particular new efforts aimed at broadly restricting legal immigration.
On Friday, the Trump administration said most immigrants seeking green cards would have to leave the United States while they waited for their applications to be processed. Many Indian citizens who have been in the United States on work visas, including for jobs in the technology sector, are applying for U.S. green cards.
“We are modernizing the U.S. immigration system for the 21st century,” Mr. Rubio said.
An Indian reporter asked Mr. Rubio about recent racist remarks against Indians from the United States. Mr. Rubio asked the reporter, Sidhant Sibal, to tell him who had made the comments, but the reporter declined to do so. “We have all seen those comments, sir,” he said.
Mr. Rubio said, “There’s stupid people in the United States that make dumb comments all the time.”
After the news conference ended, Mr. Sibal wrote in a social media post that he had been talking about Mr. Trump.
Last month, Mr. Trump posted a transcript from a right-wing podcast in which the host, Michael Savage, referred to China and India as “hellhole” places and said recent immigrants from those countries had not “integrated” into the United States as “European Americans” had.
Without naming Mr. Trump, the Indian government took the rare step of rebuking the White House on social media, calling the comments “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste.”
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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