By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers
WASHINGTON: For two years, India managed the tariff war by waiting it out. An executive order could be revoked. A proclamation could be litigated. When the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, New Delhi’s patience looked like strategy. Trump’s instruments kept dissolving in court, and India’s effective rate fell to 10 percent under a temporary Section 122 order while the bilateral trade agreement crawled forward.
That arithmetic died on Wednesday night.
The House passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 by 262–159 — 203 Republicans, 58 Democrats and one independent in favour; seven Republicans and 152 Democrats against — and sent it to a President expected to sign it. It was the chamber’s last significant act before lawmakers left Washington until after the midterms. The Senate had cleared the same text 86–11 on August 7. Speaker Mike Johnson said the bill gives the administration every tool in the toolbox.
For India, the sentence that matters is narrower. The law authorises tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries among the top five purchasers of Russian crude oil or natural gas, exempting only those importing less than 15 percent of their natural gas from Russia and taking significant steps to cut further. China and India are the largest buyers of Russian crude.
This is no longer an executive order versus Congress versus the courts. It is a statute. Every previous tariff on Indian goods rested on emergency powers of contested legality — which is precisely why the Supreme Court could vacate them. A delegation passed by both chambers with 86 Senate votes and a 103-vote House margin is a different legal object. It will not be struck down. It cannot be litigated away on separation-of-powers grounds. It survives the midterms regardless of which party wins the House, and it survives Donald Trump’s current presidency.
India’s hedge — wait, litigate, outlast — no longer exists. What remains is discretion, and the discretion belongs entirely to President Trump.
Of course, the bill did not originate as a reaction to the 2026 New Delhi BRICS summit. The late Lindsey Graham spent more than a year negotiating it. Trump came aboard only after a five-year extension of Iran sanctions was written in. Graham’s sudden death in July supplied the momentum.
But the acceleration is not imaginary. McCaul (Texas-R) and Hoyer introduced the identical House companion on August 10, during recess, and then it sat. BRICS met in New Delhi on September 12 and 13. Leaders representing 11 developing nations, including Russia, China and India, adopted a 140-paragraph declaration objecting to unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures inconsistent with WTO rules, demanding restoration of the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism, and endorsing wider use of national currencies — while naming no country at all. In Washington, things picked up pace. On September 14, the Rules Committee moved. On September 15, the rule carried 214–211. On September 16, the bill passed.
The Rules Committee killed a Hoyer amendment that would have listed the exposed countries by name, and a Meeks amendment tightening the waiver standard. Both defeats preserved identical text, which is what sent the bill straight to the Oval Office with no second Senate vote and no filibuster to fear.
India drafted the declaration’s careful ambiguity. It rejected a common BRICS currency outright and framed local-currency settlement as diversification rather than de-dollarisation. Trump’s answer came within hours: a renewed threat of tariffs up to 100 percent on the bloc. The ambiguity bought nothing, no relief from USA’s relentless tariff war.
India’s diplomacy of sovereignty, balancing the east and the west, was it then all for nothing?
So then, what are India’soptions, stated plainly? New Delhi now has three, and only three.
First, stop buying Russian crude altogether, pivot decisively to American, Gulf and Latin American barrels, and convert the Mission 500 framework into signed commitments.
Second, halve Russian volumes and attempt to argue significant steps into an exemption that was drafted around natural gas, not oil — a legally awkward fit that would leave India dependent on a waiver granted at presidential pleasure.
Or, third, continue as now and accept that its largest export market operates under a permanent, lawful threat.
The cost of the third option is not theoretical. Textiles, garments, gems and jewellery, chemicals, engineering goods and pharmaceuticals carry thin margins and heavy US exposure. A 100 percent duty does not compress margins; it removes the order book. And the damage begins before any tariff is imposed, because American buyers write sourcing contracts against risk, not against announcements.
The $500 billion squeezeis where the leverage bites. In February, Washington withdrew the additional 25 percent punitive tariff imposed in August 2025 over Russian oil, bringing India’s effective rate from roughly 50 per cent to 18 per cent. Attached to that framework were Indian purchases of up to $500 billion in American energy, aircraft, technology and farm goods, and the Mission 500 target of doubling bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030. Reporting around the framework also indicated Indian willingness to curtail Russian crude.
Eight months on, the agreement is unsigned, Section 301 exposure is unresolved, and the commerce ministry still speaks of tranches and decisions at political level. The deal moves at a crawl. Yet, the sanctions instrument moved in seventy-two hours. Trump can now close that gap by simply declining to act. Every week the trade agreement remains unsigned, the tariff authority sits on the table as an unexercised threat — which was more useful to him than any duty he could actually impose.
The judgment. Should he sign it? And become a hero for India and Modi? Won’t happen.Sign he willand turn the bill into law.The Iran extension was Trump’s asking price, and the Congress paid it.
The harder question is what he does next. Indian policymakers should not comfort themselves that sovereignty arguments will move him. Strategic autonomy is a principle in New Delhi and a negotiating obstacle in Washington. Trump has shown no evidence of treating another country’s doctrine as a constraint on his own leverage.
India’s balancing act between Washington, Moscow and Beijing has been genuinely skillful. It is also now, for the first time, priced. Congress attached a number to it — up to 100 per cent — and made that number permanent law. The decision New Delhi has spent four years avoiding has arrived. It can be taken deliberately in the coming weeks, on Indian terms, with the trade agreement as the offsetting gain. Or it can be taken for India, later, by a President under no obligation to consult. (IPA Service)
