The last time many Americans paid any attention to Jamnagar, a sunbaked industrial stretch on the mud flats on India’s Gulf of Kutch, it was thanks to Rihanna.
She performed there in March 2024 for an exclusive audience — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Ivanka Trump and the like — at the pre-wedding party for Anant Ambani, the younger son of Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.
They were in Jamnagar, which had no international airport or hotel rooms for most of the guests, because its port and oil refineries have become central to the Ambanis’ empire and $115 billion fortune.
This week, Jamnagar was the backdrop for a grittier story: Its oil — some of which is imported from Russia — has become a sticking point in U.S.-Indian relations.
Months of back-and-forth over trade between Washington and New Delhi unraveled last week, along with much of the friendly feeling between the world’s two biggest democracies. On July 30, President Trump slapped India with a 25 percent tariff. He tossed in an insult, posting on social media that American companies would soon start drilling with India’s nemesis, Pakistan.
“Who knows,” he wrote, “maybe they’ll be selling Oil to India some day!”
One week later, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that doubled the punishment. In effect, he pushed India’s exporters into peril on the grounds that their government was aiding Russia’s war aims in Ukraine by letting Indian companies profit from the international oil trade.
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The post The Tycoons Who Profit From India’s Thirst for Russian Oil appeared first on New York Times.
