A couple of days ago, while regaling a crowd in Uttar Pradesh, Narendra Modi enjoined his fellows to help shield the world’s fourth-largest economy from external pressure.

“Whatever we buy, there should be only one criteria,” he said. “We will buy those things which have been made by the sweat of an Indian.”

He probably wanted to say “sweat of a Hindu.” The only kind of naturally occurring fluid Modi likes to see dripping from India’s 200 million-strong Muslim population is blood. I wish I were joking.

Modi likes the sweat motif, by the way. When asked in December if he ever took medical leave, Modi told Indian laborers working abroad in Kuwait that, “The smell of workers’ sweat is my medicine.”

The context for Modi’s “buy Indian” message is of course the trade war and, more specifically, a worsening row with Washington. Ostensibly, Donald Trump’s upset that India buys discounted oil from Russia, but everyone knows that’s a red herring. Hell, just ask him. “I don’t care what India does with Russia,” Trump fumed, in an especially offensive July 31 social media post. “They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”

Trump doesn’t understand this, but that sort of bombast doesn’t go over well in emerging markets. It doesn’t go over well anywhere, but your average Frenchman isn’t going to get bent out of shape if Trump, in a fit of petulant rage, declares California reds superior to fine Bordeauxs. (“Trump’s an ignorant simpleton with the palate of a caveman, and he’s anyway a teetotaler. Who cares what he says about wine?”)

By contrast, telling Indians their country’s for sh-t — dismissing it as a primitive backwater — is inflammatory. Like a piece of burning debris tossed into a passenger train in Godhra. (Sorry, that’s really, really bad.)

As Bloomberg put it, Indians were “aghast,” “shocked” and “dismayed” at Trump’s “dead economy” remark. At the risk of sounding like a patronizing colonizer, God bless ’em. Imagine taking Trump’s TruthSocial posts that seriously. As though his pronouncements are the final word on quality. A man who orders well-done steaks and eats them with ketchup.

Notwithstanding his week-old contention that The White House in fact “doesn’t care” what sort of business India does with Russia, Trump recycled the oil talking point on Tuesday in a CNBC interview. “We settled on 25% [tariffs for India] but I think I’m going to raise that very substantially over the next 24 hours because they’re buying Russian oil,” he told the Squawk Box gaggle. “They’re fueling the war machine. And if they’re going to do that, I’m not going to be happy.”

Here’s a prediction: Trump will jettison that criticism as soon as Modi makes trade concessions. If and when India agrees to give America more access to the local market, the US won’t care how much oil New Delhi buys from Moscow. It doesn’t matter to Trump that Vladimir Putin’s war machine still finds ready financiers, let alone who those financiers are. Or if it does (matter), it’s only because Putin continues to make a fool of him by refusing a ceasefire.

I don’t know how far Trump will ultimately get with India. During his first term, he heaped praise on Modi, whose affinity for virulent nationalism and disdain for democratic institutions when they prove inconvenient makes him a kindred spirit of America’s tyrant aspirant. But as I’m always keen to remind readers, Modi’s no joke. He’s the genuine strongman article. And he’s a murderous ethnocentrist. He’s not (not) a man Trump can bully.

Of course, the US economy can still bully the Indian economy, even if Trump can’t personally intimidate Modi. But even that’s not guaranteed to get results. India’s pretty resilient, and if the choice is between tariffs and surrendering foreign policy sovereignty, that’s no choice at all. India pursues an independent foreign policy, period. There’s no room for discussion on that as a basic tenet.

Geopolitically, it’s not far-fetched to suggest the US needs India more than India needs the US. Sure, it’s helpful when Washington can intervene to, say, stop a nuclear exchange with Pakistan. But India’s a regional counterweight to China, and even if, as Stephen Miller suggested last week, New Delhi sometimes behaves more like a frenemy than an ally, that’s glass-house-stone-throwing from any Trump administration.

“Today, the world is going through many apprehensions and there’s an atmosphere of instability,” Modi said, during the same address quoted here at the outset. “In such a situation, the countries of the world are focusing on their respective interests.”

If anyone should appreciate the merits of self-interested transactionalism in a dangerous world, it’s Trump.