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In early September, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a cordial meeting with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in China, shortly after which he sent his national security adviser to Washington to help repair deteriorating relations.

Ajit Doval came with a message for Secretary of State Marco Rubio: India wanted to leave behind the bitterness between the two countries and negotiate a trade deal, according to New Delhi officials familiar with the meeting, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.

Doval told Rubio that India will not be intimidated by US President Donald Trump and his top aides, the people said, and that having faced other hostile US administrations in the past, he would be willing to wait out his term. Doval said in the meeting, but New Delhi wants Trump and his allies to stop publicly criticizing India so that they can get the relationship back on track.

At the time, India was smarting from Trump’s insults and the 50% tariffs imposed on its goods in August. The US President had called India a “dead” economy with high tariffs and said it was funding Putin’s war in Ukraine by buying Russian oil.

Shortly after Doval’s meeting, which had not been previously reported, the first signs of tensions easing emerged. On September 16, Trump called Modi on his birthday and praised him for doing a “tremendous job”. By the end of the year, the two leaders had spoken by phone four times, moving toward an agreement to reduce tariffs.

India’s foreign ministry and Modi’s office did not respond to emails seeking further information. A spokesperson for the US State Department said that in keeping with standard diplomatic practice, it does not disclose details of private discussions.

On Monday, Trump announced he had reached a trade deal with Modi that will reduce tariffs on India’s goods to 18%, lower than most of its peers in Asia. The punitive 25% duty that the US leader had imposed on India for buying Russian oil was also abolished. In return, Trump said, India agreed to buy US$500 billion worth of goods, switch to buying Venezuelan oil and reduce tariffs on US imports to zero. The Modi government has not confirmed those details and neither party has published any document codifying the agreement.

“The last year has been one where negotiators from both the US and India worked very hard to get us to this point,” Nisha Biswal, partner at The Asia Group and former US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “It benefits both the US and India in that you have an India that is really opening the doors to global trade.”

Publicly, there was no indication from either side that an agreement was imminent. As recently as last week, US Trade Representative Jameson Greer had said that India still had a long way to go to convince Washington that it was stopping buying crude oil from Russia.

On Monday, officials in New Delhi were caught by surprise when Trump posted about the deal on social media. Many senior bureaucrats in the foreign and commerce ministries, even those directly involved in trade talks, were unaware that a call between the leaders was scheduled that day. Some were unable to confirm key details related to the tariff announcement when contacted by reporters late last night.

However, behind the scenes, New Delhi was working to gradually get relations back on track. Doval’s meeting with Rubio in September was a signal to Washington that it sees the US as a long-term strategic partner and cannot allow relations to deteriorate further.

The prevailing view in New Delhi was that India needed US capital, technology and military cooperation to contain China and meet Modi’s goals of making the South Asian nation a developed economy by 2047. New Delhi officials said Trump was simply a blip in that timeframe, and India needed to focus on doing what was best in the long term.

“New Delhi was never going to break ties with Washington after the deterioration in bilateral relations last year,” said Chittig Bajpai, senior research fellow for South Asia at Chatham House. “India-US relations remain ‘sticky’ given the plethora of institutional and people-to-people ties between the two countries.”

“That being said,” he added, “the irrational exuberance that was New Delhi’s earlier assessment of bilateral relations has faded.”

Relations had deteriorated since Trump in May claimed credit for resolving the four-day conflict between India and neighboring Pakistan, a claim strongly rejected by Modi. In tense talks between the two leaders in June, Modi rejected Trump’s request to visit the White House, where the US president was hosting Pakistan’s army chief at the time. In October, Modi skipped a summit in Malaysia to avoid a potentially awkward meeting with Trump.

The arrival of the new US Ambassador to New Delhi, Sergio Gore, in December appeared to mark the beginning of more serious efforts to get relations back on track. Gore, a former senior White House official and longtime member of Trump’s inner circle, who is also close to Rubio, has repeatedly underlined the importance of US-India relations. In his first public speech in his new role, Gore described the tensions between the two countries as a disagreement between “real friends”, which he said both sides were certain to resolve. He also announced that India would be invited to join the US-led coalition called Pax Silica to strengthen supply chains.

Relations saw a further deterioration last week during a meeting between Gore and Foreign Minister Subramaniam Jaishankar, according to people familiar with the matter. Gore said in a social-media post that the two sides discussed “everything from defense, trade, critical minerals and working toward our common interests,” adding: “Stay tuned for much more!”

“This appears to end a difficult six months for US-India relations,” said Alexander Slater, former head of the US-India Business Council. “It also adds to recent signals about where India’s economic future is headed” and “removes a significant hurdle in India’s gradual but steady alignment with the West.”

Despite the rapprochement, India has reason to proceed cautiously with Trump, and is keen to assert its strategic autonomy. Officials in New Delhi said Modi’s viral moment of joining hands and laughing with Xi and Putin was intended to show Trump that he had other options. Modi rolled out the red carpet for Putin in December, showcasing ties with a country that has been a vital source of arms and diplomatic support since the Cold War.

Last week, Modi inked a free trade deal with the EU after nearly two decades of negotiations, which came just months after India’s trade deal with Britain – details that showed India was serious about diversifying its trade ties in the face of the standoff with the US.

Later this month, Modi will host Canada’s Mark Carney and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in New Delhi, and will use Trump’s New World Order to forge closer economic and political ties with so-called “middle power” countries.

Nevertheless, the US remains an important partner for India, both as a market and a source of investment. The country sends about a fifth of its exports to the US, a large portion of which are mobile phones and electronic goods, sectors crucial to Modi’s manufacturing ambitions. US companies have pledged major investments in India in recent months, particularly in AI, including Amazon.com Inc. in December. And Microsoft Corp. This includes a joint pledge of $52 billion by the Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced a $15 billion investment in data centers in October.

India is also becoming more important to the US financial industry. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has its largest office outside New York in the South Indian city of Bengaluru, where it provides sophisticated IT and financial technology support to clients around the world.

“The larger geopolitical factors or strategic factors that bind India and the US together are still there,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “India needs a huge amount of capital, investment, technology transfer, investment. That’s why America is important.”