Captain Machchhar will find it easy to make a connection with the American audience that Indian diplomacy may not find easy to do otherwise
India-US bilateral relations are currently at their lowest point since 1998, when India’s Pokhran-II nuclear tests triggered mandatory American sanctions under the Glenn Amendment. There is no debate over who is at fault: President Donald Trump first lied about his role in achieving a ceasefire after the Pahalgam terrorist attack and Operation Sindoor; he then proceeded to treat General Asim Munir — the alleged mastermind behind the Pahalgam massacre — to a private White House lunch, before meeting him more officially at the White House three months later, and then on the sidelines of this year’s United Nations General Assembly meeting.
More recently, Trump has slapped sanctions on India and threatened even more under the terms of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has handled the crisis masterfully to prevent further damage to bilateral ties.
While most American officials are pro-India, the series of crises has left them playing it safe. Republican senators and representatives feared Trump’s anger more than they valued doing the right thing. Democrats, meanwhile, prioritised the ignorance of the extremes of their progressive base over reality.
There are constituencies in both India and the United States that wish to see relations continue to sour. In India, many old-school diplomats, politicians and senior civil servants who grew up in a Cold War milieu still internalise anti-America and anti-Israel biases. Khalistan terrorists, meanwhile, find advocates in self-described Sikh civil rights groups, while the red-green alliance between progressives and Islamists embraces both pro-Khalistan propaganda and anti-Hindutva calumny at face value. While Trump is bad, his departure in two years will not bring relief, as the growing influence of the Democrats’ progressive wing could make any new Democratic candidate seem more like Justin Trudeau than Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
Indian diplomats, too, need to buckle up. They should work at cultivating the informal relationships on which Washington runs. New Delhi might be frustrated by how Washington projects its own values and assumptions into relations, but it should also push its Ministry of External Affairs bureaucracy into war mode to reorient its diplomacy in Washington, D.C.
To win back the hearts and minds of the American public, whose own historical amnesia means memories of a warming relationship are fading fast, Prime Minister Modi and Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar should take advantage of the heroism of Indian pilot Smit Machchhar in averting tragedy on Flydubai flight 1073.
While the Indian pilot now recovers in an Abu Dhabi hospital, India should already be planning for Captain Machchhar to become an unofficial emissary for India. After being severely wounded with an axe, he had the presence of mind to open a locked cockpit door to give the plane’s passengers a chance at life. Had he not taken those actions, the recovery of remains would either still be ongoing in the Saudi Arabian desert or at possible targets into which the hijacker might have planned to crash the aircraft, most likely a Jordanian military base or a Tel Aviv skyscraper.
Captain Machchhar’s humanism, heroism and fundamental decency personify modern India. He will find it easy to make a connection with the American audience that Indian diplomacy may not find easy to do otherwise. Forcing Americans to juxtapose Captain Machchhar with General Munir would also reinject relations with a moral clarity lost under Trump.
Captain Machchhar’s recovery has a long way to go but, for the sake of bilateral ties, let us hope Americans can soon see him not only in Washington, DC, and New York, but also in larger cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Boston, Atlanta and Seattle, and, for that matter, Des Moines, Wichita and Huntsville as well. He should speak not only at Jewish synagogues, churches and Hindu temples, but also in mosques and Sikh gurdwaras. And if that means trimming a cocktail party here and there for the Ministry of External Affairs, the price will certainly be worth it.
(Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a distinguished fellow at the Usanas Foundation. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
Source: www.firstpost.com
