While the BJP has expressed in firm terms that the strong India-US relationship has bipartisan support, Trump has not shied away from using his bonhomie with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to build his support among the Indian-American community.
In September, Trump held the Howdy Modi rally in Houston, which saw over 50,000 people attend. In February, Trump visited India’s Motera Stadium and issued a ringing endorsement of Modi.
Now, as the race for the 2020 US elections heats up, Trump has invoked Modi’s praise to bolster his defence of how his administration has handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have the best testing programme in the world by far...we’ve tested more people than India, than many, many big countries put together. India's second, we are 44 million tests ahead of India. They have 1.5 billion people,” Trump said at a campaign rally at an airport in Nevada.
“And Prime Minister Modi calls me [and] says what a job you’ve done with testing,” he added, referring to an as-yet unverified phone call between him and PM Modi.
Modi and Trump last spoke in June, Hindustan Times reported.
With over 6.6 million cases of COVID-19 and nearly 200,000 deaths from the virus, the US has been the world’s worst-hit country by far, with Trump’s administration facing much of the blame even as the President admitted to wanting to play down the deadliness of the virus in the early stages.
However, while the US has been recording a steady reduction in the number of daily new cases after a new peak was hit following a second wave (which some argued was a continuation of the first), India has since eclipsed the US’ record daily tally of new cases and is on track to surpass the US total by the end of November.
Ironically, in June Trump had instructed his administration to “slow the testing down” in the belief that more tests would show more cases. The US has conducted over 86 million COVID-19 tests according to a tracker by The Atlantic.
At the Nevada rally, Trump also took the opportunity to respond to a campaign ad by Biden which alleged that he did not care for veterans, Trump said he was now prepared to get “really vicious” in the political slugfest moving forward.
