United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday told Fox Business that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was “largely performative”, adding that India and the United States will get their problems solved.
His remarks came hours after leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation met at a summit in China’s Tianjin. The multilateral forum comprises India, China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran, and five nations from the Eurasian region.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the summit on Sunday and Monday.
The meetings took place five days after a 50% tariff rate on goods imported from India to the US took effect.
The Donald Trump administration had announced on August 6 that it would double the tariffs on goods imported from India to 50% for purchasing Russian oil amid the Ukraine war. A 25% so-called reciprocal tariff had already taken effect.
In an interview to the American news network on Monday, Bessent said that India’s values were much closer to those of the US and China than Russia.
“This is a longstanding meeting, it’s called the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and I think it’s largely performative,” Bessent said about the summit.
When asked about the status of the India-US relationship amid the imposition of tariffs, the US treasury secretary said: “I think at the end of the day, two great countries will get this solved.”
However, Bessent also claimed that Indians had “not been great actors in terms of buying Russian oil and then reselling it, financing the Russian war effort in Ukraine”.
He reiterated that the slow progress in the trade talks between the two countries was an additional factor for raising tariffs.
Bessent had told Fox Business on August 27 that the relationship between New Delhi and Washington was “very complicated” and that he hoped that “at the end of the day, we will come together”.
The US treasury secretary had claimed that the unease in the bilateral relationship was not just because of India’s Russian oil purchases but also the delay in the two countries reaching a trade agreement.
Negotiators from both countries had completed a fifth round of talks in Washington in July. The next round, scheduled for August 25, was abruptly cancelled.
‘Totally one-sided’, says Trump
After the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit on Monday, Trump claimed that his country had a “totally one-sided” trade relationship with India and reiterated his allegations that New Delhi charged inordinately high tariffs on American goods.
“What few people understand is that we do very little business with India, but they do a tremendous amount of business with us,” the US president had said on social media. “In other words, they sell us massive amounts of goods, their biggest ‘client,’ but we sell them very little. Until now a totally one-sided relationship, and it has been for many decades.”
Trump has repeatedly alleged that India’s imports were fuelling Russia’s war in Ukraine.
New Delhi had previously said that it was “extremely unfortunate” that the US had chosen to impose additional tariffs on India “for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest”.
Also read: Modi in China: New détente or a progressive trajectory?
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