New Delhi, India: For decades, India has preferred to settle its disagreements with friendly powers quietly, behind closed doors and away from the cameras. Nowhere has that habit been more pronounced than in its dealings with Washington, a relationship that has long enjoyed broad support across Indian party lines and successive American administrations. This week, in a conference room in New York, the habit broke.

Speaking at an Asia Society event after the United Nations General Assembly wound down, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar offered a blunt verdict on the United States. He said it had been insensitive to India's concerns over "terrorism", had warmed to Pakistan, its long-standing rival, and had pursued "self-centred" trade policies that landed hardest on the Global South.

The assessment marks a new edge in how New Delhi is handling the second Trump administration, and it landed in the same week that Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a telephone call with President Donald Trump. The Indian leader described the conversation as "productive", a cool and formal word far removed from the "good friend" he once applied to the American president.

Analysts say the shift is not rhetorical drift. It reflects months of accumulated friction over trade, tariffs, Pakistan and migration, and a growing sense in New Delhi that patience and private appeals have bought India little. Jaishankar put the point in almost philosophical terms. "If I stand back and look at the relationship, I note that much of the world has had a more difficult relationship with the US," he said. "I mean, that may not be a consolation, but that's a reality." The new tone also arrives at a politically sensitive moment for Modi, who faces opposition criticism at home that his government has repeatedly bent to American pressure.

Trade sits at the centre of the strain. The United States is India's largest trading partner, with two-way goods trade reaching 149.1 billion dollars in 2025, but the relationship leans heavily toward New Delhi, which ran a goods surplus of 58.4 billion dollars. Negotiations toward a bilateral trade agreement have produced a roadmap but no finished deal, and the most contested ground remains agriculture, a sector India has kept largely closed for decades to protect its farmers.

Jaishankar did not disguise the difficulty. "Apart from the per capita gap between India and the United States, the nature of production and the nature of society is very different," he said. The expectation that India's farm sector could open rapidly, he added, was tested against a "ground reality" that was "much more complex". He acknowledged that the talks had created "bumps last year for the relationship", while insisting that "there is more or less an understanding on the trade agreement" and that closing it "would contribute to a better relationship".

Tariffs have sharpened the argument. India was among the countries facing some of the highest rates imposed by Trump before the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping tariff regime in February, after which the administration pivoted to other tools, including a new 10 percent global tariff. The minister partly blamed the economic spillover of the wars in Iran and Ukraine, urging "sound common sense" so that the basic needs of countries were not neglected. This month, the president signed legislation under which the United States can impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries such as India that buy Russian oil.

That measure, due to take effect in less than a month, now looms over the whole relationship. Ajay Bisaria, a retired diplomat who served as high commissioner to Canada and Pakistan and as ambassador to Poland, called it "a deal breaker in the relationship right now". "If that becomes reality, then all Indian efforts would come under scrutiny," he said.

The rupture goes well beyond commerce. In May of last year, New Delhi fought a four-day war with Pakistan after an attack by armed fighters in Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 civilians. Trump then announced a ceasefire, saying he had threatened both nuclear-armed neighbours with economic damage if they did not stop. For India, any question touching Kashmir is strictly bilateral with Pakistan, with no room for third-party mediation, and New Delhi took offence at the American president's repeated claims, made dozens of times and renewed during the General Assembly, that he had brokered the truce.

Pakistan, meanwhile, drew closer to Washington. Its leaders praised Trump lavishly and put him forward for a Nobel Peace Prize, and the Islamabad-Washington relationship bloomed, to New Delhi's evident displeasure.

Jaishankar put terrorism at the top of India's grievances. "As a country, perhaps there are very few countries which have been subjected to the kind of terrorism that we have from a neighbour as part of a deliberate, conscious policy over many, many decades," he said, in an unmistakable reference to Pakistan. "Now, if something which matters so deeply to us, there isn't enough understanding or appreciation or empathy of that, I think that creates a problem too."

The minister said India's primary concerns are "not fully appreciated" by its partner in Washington. Harsh Pant, vice president of the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank, said the administration's "obsession with Pakistan" without regard for Indian sensitivities had hardened the mood. "When, at the top level, you don't see reciprocity, then calculations change, and decisions are taken to bring differences out in the open," he said.

Migration is a third fault line. Indians have been the largest beneficiaries of the H1B visa programme for skilled foreign workers, but the scheme has come under sustained fire from the Trump administration, which has raised barriers and fees amid criticism from the president's own supporters. Jaishankar framed the change in structural terms. "For many years, mobility was seen as an economic gain. Today, the economics of mobility and the politics of mobility are at odds with each other, at least in some quarters," he said, adding: "That certainly in public perception is an issue."

The domestic backdrop gives the new rhetoric its political force. India is the world's most populous country, and questions of migration and mobility touch a vast public. Pant noted that the same connections that once made the United States "an attractive partner for a large mass of Indians" are now becoming "a negative drag on the relationship". "The public mood in India is also changing perceptibly towards the US. And I think the government is articulating that negative sentiment now publicly," he said.

Bisaria set out the electoral calculus in plain terms. "Modi is feeling domestic pressure, with key state elections coming up next year, especially amid some anti-incumbency," he said. "It dictates that the government's posture should not be one of taking bullying from the US."

For all the friction, neither side appears ready to walk away. Chietigj Bajpaee, a senior research fellow for South Asia at the Chatham House think tank, said Jaishankar's remarks "offer a frank assessment" of the relationship. "Clearly, the shine has come off the bilateral relationship after India was initially among the most optimistic about a second Trump term," he said.

Bajpaee read the downturn as more about Washington than about Delhi, describing it as "a reflection of the Trump administration's transactional and often unpredictable or erratic foreign policy". That, he argued, "offers a potential off-ramp for an eventual reset in relations", with a completed trade agreement as "a key watchpoint". Both capitals, he said, "have not given up on reviving their relationship".

Pant was more blunt. For New Delhi, he said, "it is now just the question of waiting Mr Trump out", adding that India is not alone in that queue. "Everyone is waiting him out. President Trump has little respect for conventions and norms of inter-state behaviour. How do you just deal with that individual?" he said.

The wider strategic frame is set out in a September research report by Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow who studies Indian foreign policy. Her argument is that India has been sceptical of the United States-led liberal international order since its independence, and that the present moment is strange precisely because Washington now seems eager to abandon an order it once championed. For the world's two largest democracies, the report concludes, this transition brings a host of challenges, and a few opportunities for collaboration.

What happens next is, on this week's evidence, a watching game. The immediate test is the 100 percent tariff on Russian-oil buyers, due within a month, and the unfinished trade agreement that both sides describe as nearly there. New Delhi's newly public irritation is calibrated to tell Washington that its patience has limits, while still leaving room for the reset that analysts in both capitals consider possible. For now, the queue of governments waiting out the Trump administration has one more, increasingly vocal, member.