Peter Navarro, the trade advisor of Donald Trump, had once tried to start a fight between the US President and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor of the US, told NDTV today. He suggested that it is a sideshow that can be safely ignored while the "the real negotiators dealing with the trade talks between the two countries sit down". India, he said, "can stay away from the threats and shouts in social media and just do the hard work and see if we can't reach an accommodation here".
"I'm not saying these issues are going to be easy or quickly resolved, but I think there will be good faith on both sides, and that's the way to try and work through it," he told NDTV in an exclusive interview.
As for Mr Navarro, he said, "If you left Peter alone in a room and came back an hour later, he would be in an argument with himself".
The trade advisor of President Trump has been sounding belligerent notes over New Delhi's purchase of Russian oil, calling it "blood money".
He has dubbed India "Tariff Maharaja" and threatened that it "won't end well" for New Delhi if it does not "come around" at some point in trade negotiations with the United States.
He also made other statements that were called out and fact-checked. His response was aggressive. India's "keyboard minions", he claimed, were using "Community Notes" on X to "bury the facts".
Asked about the time when Mr Navarro had tried to start an argument between President Trump and PM Modi during one of their meetings, Mr Bolton said it was a meeting "where I had hoped that the two leaders would talk about strategic issues, as dealing with China, dealing with enormous threats that we face through the rest of this century".
"And he just, Peter, just wanted to talk about what he felt were unfair Indian trade practices. Look, I have watched trade people do this. There are always grievances in trade issues. It is in the nature of the subject matter," he said.
Mr Bolton said while trade between Washington and New Delhi is unquestionably important, "between India and the US for the rest of this century, there are very, very important existential questions".
"I'm not diminishing the importance of trade. It makes a huge difference in both economies. But let's keep it in perspective," he added.
Two decades of gains in the India-US ties - reached through careful nurturing by multiple governments - had plummeted as President Trump imposed 25 per cent reciprocal tariff and then doubled it by adding another 25 per cent on account of New Delhi's Russian oil imports.
Lately, there appeared a bit of an uptick with President Trump and PM Modi exchanging messages on social media.
Regarding that, Mr Bolton said President Trump sees international relations "through the prism of his personal relationship with foreign leaders".
"So from Trump's perspective, if he and Prime Minister Modi have a good personal relationship, everything is fine between India and the United States. Obviously it is much more complicated than that. But at least from the Trump perspective, it's better than tweets and statements that are negative about Prime Minister Modi," Mr Bolton added.
Asked whether India's rest of relationship with China would affect strategic ties with the US, Mr Bolton said while he understood the sentiments in New Delhi, it is essential to keep "reality" in mind.
"I think it depends on whether you believe somehow China has changed its hegemonic aspirations all along its Indo-Pacific periphery. And I don't think they have," he said.
"The bigger picture is the hard strategic reality, not just the strange things Donald Trump does. So these realities remain. And I think if we consider them in a low-key, non-public fashion and work them out, that the course ahead will become a lot easier for both Washington and New Delhi," Mr Bolton added.
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