Former US President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he'll see ''fantastic man'' Prime Minister Narendra Modi next week when the latter comes to the US.
"He happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he's fantastic. I mean, fantastic, man," Trump declared at a town hall meeting in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday.
The ministry of External Affairs said PM Modi will be visiting the US from Saturday to Monday.
The Ministry had listed only the participation of PM Modi in the Quad Summit in Delaware on Saturday, his speech to the Indian diaspora at Long Island on Sunday and his address to the United Nations Summit of the Future on Monday.
It did not indicate that he would meet Trump but merely said, "On the sidelines of the Summit, the Prime Minister would be holding bilateral meetings with several world leaders and discuss issues of mutual interest.".
calendar for the campaign shows Trump in North Carolina on Saturday, and in Pennsylvania on Monday evening with nothing pencilled in for Sunday.
He mentioned the meeting with PM Modi while talking about trade imbalances and how he'd ratchet up the ante on imported goods from India through a Trump Reciprocal Tax Act.
He described India as "a very big abuser" of the tariffs system because of the high duties it imposes on some imported goods from the US, adding New Delhi "is very tough" in negotiations.
If anyone charges us 10 cents, if they charge us $2, if they charge us 100 per cent 250, we charge them the same, he said.
Listing India among them, he said countries the US was trading with are "the sharpest people. They're not a little bit backward … they're at the top of their game, and they use it against us".
"China is the toughest of all, but we were taking care of China with the tariffs, so we're going to do a reciprocal trade," he added
While in office Trump tangled with India over tariffs, focusing attention on the duties imposed on Harley-Davidson motorcycles and whiskey.
He hiked duties on steel and aluminium imports and axed the Generalised Scheme of Preferences that provided for concessional tariffs for some Indian exports and New Delhi retaliated by raising duties mostly on agricultural exports like apples and almonds.
Despite their differences on trade, PM Modi and Trump bonded personally.
With the elections going to the polls barely five weeks down the line, and the current scenario such that Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in almost a tie, it is a tightrope walk for PM Modi: neither give indications of favoritism to any one party but kept his lines of communication open to both.
Before the 2020 election that Trump lost, PM Modi appeared alongside him at a community event billed as "Howdy Modi", in Houston in 2019 and, in a play of his own election slogan, cheered him, "Abki baar, Trump sarkar" (This time, Trump's government").
That and a spectacle for Trump with over 1,00,000 people in Ahmedabad in 2020 became an embarrassment when Biden defeated him.
But Biden and PM Modi pushed it aside as he extended all details of his visit to develop ties even further between their countries.
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