At the G7 summit in France on Wednesday 17 June, Narendra Modi raised with Donald Trump directly the killing of three Indian seafarers who died under US Navy fire in the Hormuz zone. India had already lodged two formal protests over the deaths. Modi also pressed the trade damage: 90 per cent of India's liquefied petroleum gas and 55 per cent of its crude transited Hormuz before the war, and he warned of a "trust deficit" between the two governments1. The two men exchanged a restrained greeting, no embrace.
Trump answered none of it. He offered no apology for the sailors, announced no investigation or compensation, signed no tariff relief and made no concession on Iran-routed crude. For a president who had just signed a war to a close, the ledger at the table with the war's most aggrieved neutral party was empty.
The summit itself ended without a joint communique, the body's first such failure in recent memory, and Trump left early as the Iran deal moved. The split was over Iran: G7 members could not agree a common line on a deal whose own text remains unpublished. India sits outside the G7 but supplies the clearest measure of the blockade's cost, and Modi chose to carry that measure straight to the man who ordered the fleet that caused it. He got a handshake and no instrument in return.
