CHENNAI, India — On the eve of the U.S. presidential election in the southern Indian city of Chennai, one retired professional said he was all in for Donald Trump: "He's the right man," said Bala Raja, 84, sporting an NYC cap.
Male voters in particular helped Trump win last week's U.S. election. But thousands of miles away — even in Besant Nagar, the Chennai suburb where Kamala Harris' mother Shyamala Gopalan was raised — Indian men like Raja echoed that Trump support.
And why Trump? Peacemaking, they said.
"He will control everybody," Raja said after worshiping in the Varasiddhi Vinayaka Temple that overlooks the seaside where Harris once strolled with her grandfather on visits to her mother's birth country. "He will control the Chinese and the Russians," Raja says.
Raja said he believed that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump was in power: "[Trump] would have stopped the war."
Beside him, another man nodded. When Trump was in office the first time, R. Srikanth said, Russian leader Vladimir Putin didn't dare invade Ukraine. This time around, "He'll talk to Putin," Srikanth said of Trump. "The world wants some sort of peace so everybody can grow."
The two men, like Trump, did not elaborate on how the U.S. president-elect would end the wars or what policies he might pursue to convince the warring parties to sue for peace either in Ukraine or Gaza.
The world's most populous country has consistently held favorable views of Trump. In a June poll by the Pew Research Center, 42% of Indians said they had confidence in Trump, one of the highest global ratings at that time.
By gender, 51% of Indian men in the poll said they were confident in Trump, and 32% of women. Only in Ghana, Nigeria and Bangladesh did a higher percentage of men express confidence in Trump. Indian media claim that India hosts more Trump-branded real estate than any other country in the world except the U.S.
The idea in India and elsewhere of Trump as a peacemaker is a recent phenomenon, says Sumitra Badrinathan, an American University political scientist. "There's a lot of people across the world who do believe this narrative that Trump is going to end the wars. It's not unique to India," she says.
That narrative — that Trump will end global conflicts — was constantly repeated by the president-elect and his surrogates on the campaign trail, in person and online. It's a theme he repeats in his social media, invoking the slogan "peace through strength."
That rhetoric, filtered through WhatsApp groups, convinced Indians such as 29-year-old engineer Goutam Nimmagadda, who watched the sunset by the Chennai seashore on the U.S. election day, Nov. 5. "He wants to stop wars and all of that," Nimmagadda said, referring to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. "Probably that's the reason people say that maybe Trump would be better for the world."
Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., says perceptions like this can perhaps be best understood by India's experience under the first Trump administration.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoyed close relations with Trump, and was even feted with a campaign-like event billed as "Howdy Modi" at Houston's NRG stadium in September 2019. The following February, India responded with a "Namaste Trump" event, where some 100,000 people crammed into a cricket stadium.
"The U.S. relationship with India really wasn't something that was caught up in turmoil [during the first Trump administration]. In fact, you could argue that it went from strength to strength," Vaishnav says.
In a second Trump administration, analysts say the Indian government expects to build on its U.S. trade ties and hopes to duck punitive tariffs. The Indian government may also face less pressure on its human rights record and over its purchase of Russian oil, despite Western embargoes.
The warm relationship between the two leaders is also a factor, Vaishnav says.
Perhaps, he says, that could be a reason why Indian men in particular may view Trump as a peacemaker. "They see similarities between Modi and Trump," he says. "One of the things Modi has tried to do is position himself as a peacemaker," Vaishnav says, referring to the Indian prime minister's summer meetings with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The meetings were six weeks apart and in each, Modi hugged his host.
"It's this idea that we live in this chaotic world," says Vaishnav. "There's a lot of instability, there's a lot of global volatility. And we need these sort of larger than life strongman figures to essentially stabilize that system."
There might be another reason altogether why some now believe that Trump will end conflict. "I think we have to consider the simple explanation," says Badrinathan of American University, "which is that they did not hear any other message. This is the only one they heard."
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