India has failed to resolve the agrarian issue and Trump is punishing it for it.

India and the United States are two of the three largest agri-food economies in the world (the third is China), but while the American superpower produces this immense mass of agri-food with only 800,000 farmers , whose productivity is the highest in the global system, India needs 700 million farmers to produce something similar.

That's why India needs tariffs of 120% / 80% / 70% , which are the highest in the global system.

This is what Donald Trump means when he says that most of India's production is "a dead economy" incapable of innovation and accumulation.

Hence, the US president has imposed a combined tariff of 50% on India: 25% as "reciprocal tariffs" and another 25% as a geopolitical sanction for being one of Russia's two largest energy buyers.

Jean Bodin says that “the essence of sovereignty is the arbitrary exercise of power.”

The astonishing thing is that a country in these conditions, with access to almost 30% of its gross domestic product cut off, has imposed a trade deficit of $67 billion on the US in 2024, with bilateral trade of just over $200 billion annually; and this occurs between the first and fourth largest economies in the global system.

Trump refuses to accept that India should keep its massive agricultural markets closed to US exports, and dismisses as laughable and completely alien to the American mindset Narendra Modi 's argument that he is obliged to protect the status quo of his incompetently domestic production.

Trump specializes in disrupting the status quo everywhere at once, and now he's focused on India.

Hence, Trump is now quite naturally demanding that Narendra Modi break the status quo and make domestic production competitive. Problems can only be solved through higher levels of productivity. For Trump, this is a matter of common sense, and he is unimpressed by mystical or cultural arguments.

It should be noted that this is a path that Narendra Modi has attempted and failed miserably in the face of a virtual peasant insurrection that erupted between 2020 and 2021, which caused the New Delhi government to retreat clearly and unambiguously.

In 2020/2021, the Indian government passed three laws that allowed private companies to directly purchase crops from producers, aiming to improve their profits with greater freedom of action and thus begin a process of accumulation and technological innovation that would allow them to compete.

The 700 million producers of the subcontinent flatly rejected this innovation, demanding that they remain exclusively with the State as the sole buyer at fixed prices in the country created in 1947, after two centuries of British rule, by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

The entire system of links between Indian agriculture and state structures is a perfect example of bureaucratic paralysis and widespread, systematic corruption.

This explains why Narendra Modi's greatest reform attempt was defeated by his own beneficiaries; and since then, the agri-food sector in the world's fourth-largest economy has been virtually paralyzed. And then came Donald Trump, the expert at shattering the status quo, both in the US and in the global system.

There is a historical example that is essential to bring up. The fundamental fact that allowed China to become the world's second-largest economy (US$18.6 trillion / 19% of global GDP) and the only one capable of challenging the US for technological primacy was that the reform process that began in 1978, led by Deng Xiaoping, when he turned the country toward capitalism and globalization, gave absolute priority to the transformation of Chinese agriculture, with its 5,000 years of history, before industry and cities. "Everything in China always revolves," Mao Tse-tung told André Malraux, "around the primacy of the peasantry and rurality."

The fact that China grew for more than 30 years at a cumulative rate of 9.9% per year—the highest level in the longest period in the history of capitalism since the First Industrial Revolution (1780/1840)—was due exclusively to the prior resolution of the agrarian question . In truly decisive historical processes, the order of factors is essential to the product.

Everything now depends on what Narendra Modi and his government do in the coming days, months, and years, during which they will have to act on the premise that their main geopolitical rival in Asia, the People's Republic of China, has already sealed a cooperation and potentially partnership pact with the United States; and that Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, that great destroyer of the status quo, have agreed that the American president will travel to Beijing, probably this year and in October.

Time is running out for the country of timeless civilization that is India, the world's fourth-largest economy and soon to be the third.