India Pulse Market: Not now daal-ing, says MAGA, as Montana governor comes to India to sell pulses
TOI correspondant from Washington: In Montana, ‘traffic’ is when you have to wait for three deer and a stray cow to cross the highway, so goes the joke about a state where “just down the road” can mean a two-hour drive with no cellphone service. Yet for Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, one road this week stretches 8,000 miles, from the Big Sky State to India, home to 1.4 billion potential customers.Gianforte, a Republican, arrived in New Delhi on Monday at the head of a delegation of more than 30 Montanans representing agriculture, higher education, critical minerals, manufacturing, photonics, quantum technology and bioscience. The mission runs through October 9 and continues to Sri Lanka, and its major commercial pitch is deliciously simple: buy our daal, dahlings.Montana is America’s largest producer of lentils and chickpeas and India is the world’s largest consumer and importer of pulse crops. In 2025, however, India’s purchases of Montana peas, lentils and chickpeas were for chicken feed, only about $14 million, which, along with commercial aircraft parts, made India Montana’s 29th-largest trading partner.For a state of just over a million people – the population of an Indian mofussil town – India represents a huge opportunity. Montana’s agricultural economy is substantial, but its producers need markets far beyond the state’s borders, and indeed beyond the US and that is precisely where Gianforte’s India trip collides with the conflict in Republican politics: the same MAGA constituency demanding that America buy American is also deeply suspicious when American governors go abroad to sell American products, particularly when the prospective customers are Indians.The backlash in this case has been instant and fierce. MAGA hardliners have questioned why Montana should deepen ties with India when, they argue, Indian students and faculty are “capturing” Montana universities.One viral discussion singled out Montana State University faculty with Indian roots, including Shivali Banerjee, an agricultural engineering professor with a PhD from IIT Bombay, and Sreekala and Dilpreet Bajwa, senior figures in the university’s agriculture and engineering programs. Montana State’s own records identify Sreekala Bajwa as vice president for agriculture and Dilpreet Bajwa as head of mechanical and industrial engineering.The irony is difficult to miss: Montana wants to sell agricultural products to India while some of its political activists are objecting to Indians teaching Montanans how to improve agriculture and engineering. “You need to be in America working for Americans, not jews or Indians. You are a traitor to the US,” one post aimed at Gianforte read.The controversy illustrates a growing bind for Republican governors, with Texas governor Greg Abbott facing a similar backlash in recent weeks. Their job is not to conduct immigration policy; it is to grow their states’ economies. They want foreign investment, export markets, international students, researchers, and skilled workers, provided all of this produces jobs, tax revenue and prosperity at home. But the political language of the MAGA movement increasingly questions the efficacy of this model.Abbott, whose state has a bigger economy and larger Indian-origin population, has simultaneously cultivated Texas’s enormous desi business community and taken a harder line on H-1B visas.In January, he ordered Texas state agencies and universities to freeze new H-1B petitions, arguing that jobs should go first to Texans. Yet he and other Texas Republicans are also aggressively courting Indian-American voters and business interests, creating an obvious tension between economic pragmatism and anti-immigration rhetoric from the MAGA base.Gianforte’s dilemma is even more excruciating. Montana needs buyers; its farmers cannot sell lentils merely to Montanans, and its universities cannot become globally competitive by hiring only people born within state lines.And its emerging technology and scientific sectors cannot prosper by pretending talent stops at the adjoining Canadian border.There is a lesson for Gianforte from Montana’s own diplomatic history. Mike Mansfield, the state’s legendary senator and later ambassador to Japan, was a strong proponent in the 1960s of good ties with India.He was among the first lawmakers to appreciate India’s desire for strategic autonomy, and he understood that being from a small state should not inhibit big thinking. The foreign relations titan looked across the Pacific when much of America was looking inward, helping deepen US engagement with Asia, including India.Gianforte’s mission is more prosaic, selling Montana lentils, peas and chickpeas to India’s 1.4 billion people — but the principle is much the same: Big Sky country cannot afford small-world thinking.
