Trump Wanted Praise, Pak Gave It, India Did Not, Raghuram Rajan Says Tariff Gap Resulted

India-West News Desk

WASHINGTON, DC – Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has offered a theory, in a video that has gone viral, of why the US under President Donald Trump slapped a 50% tariff on India.

Rajan’s underlying argument is that the decision had less to do with trade or geopolitics and far more to do with how Trump responds to praise. According to him, Pakistan understood this and leaned into it, while India did the opposite.

Rajan pointed back to the May conflict between India and Pakistan following the Pahalgam terrorist attack. He said the turning point was not the clash itself but the diplomatic choreography that followed. “Pakistan played Trump the right way. They said the ceasefire was due to Trump. India said the deal was reached without him. The net effect is that Pakistan has a 19 percent tariff and India has a 50 percent tariff.”

It has been speculated openly in many quarters that what mattered most to Trump was acknowledgment and flattery, even more so because he saw the crisis as an opportunity for a statesmanlike moment and even a Nobel-sizedclaim.

He elaborated on this point at the University of Zurich, “I think the central issue was more personalities and especially a personality in the White House and how they treated certain comments made by India after Mr Trump claimed credit for stopping a conflict between India and Pakistan… Pakistan played it the right … said that it was all because of Trump….”

Rajan said India did not go along. “India tried to argue that the two countries had reached an agreement without Mr Trump…. the truth is probably somewhere in between…. But the net effect was that India got 50 percent tariffs, Pakistan got 19 percent. I understand that there was some comment about how your leader in Switzerland tried to explain the tariffs to Mr Trump and that did not go well… so we do not know what really happened between India and the US, but hopefully in the longer run sanity prevails on all sides and we all reach reasonable deals.”

The ceasefire that ended the hostilities was followed by competing narratives about who deserved credit. Trump publicly claimed he had personally stopped the conflict. India immediately dismissed that version. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, also denied any intervention by Trump. But Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif later shifted the tone and asserted that Trump had indeed played a key role in halting the confrontation.

Rajan’s comments suggest that in Trump’s Washington, praise was not just ornamental. It could shape policy outcomes. Pakistan understood it. India did not. And the tariff rates were adjusted accordingly.