
The world according to Grok: India must keep trade issues apart from free speech
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India has been playing nice with America’s Donald Trump administration. So too with EV-maker Tesla and the satellite services arm of SpaceX, both led by Elon Musk, who is widely seen as President Trump’s confidant, a billionaire shaking up the US by taking a chainsaw to its government under the Department of Government Efficiency.
This contrasts with the response of several other countries that the US has threatened with punitive tariffs. Therefore, many see as dark irony the aggressive stance adopted by another firm owned by Elon Musk, X, the microblog platform that he took over in 2022, in suing the government of India over what it sees as attempts to censor free speech. The lawsuit, filed last week, comes amid a furore over what xAI’s chatbot Grok has been saying on X.
At the outset, let us be clear that there are two separate issues at stake here. One is an effective strategy for dealing with the White House and its notion of US greatness that departs from classic win-win principles of free trade. The other relates to different conceptions of free expression.
It makes sense for New Delhi to refrain from talking tough and focus on negotiating the best deal India can get on US reciprocal tariffs. Depending on whether these are levied on individual items or on classes of products, the impact on our US-bound exports would differ. The sheer structural difference between the two economies would ensure that what we export to the US will overlap little with what we import from it.
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