- Marco Rubio is in India from October 17 to 22, with stops in Mumbai and Jamnagar and none in New Delhi.
- The foreign ministry confirmed Friday that S Jaishankar will meet him on October 20, a day after the US ambassador had already said so.
- Rahul Gandhi says Rubio "summoned" an Indian minister. The government hasn't replied.
- A trade deal that was supposed to be close in May still isn't signed.
Marco Rubio's India itinerary has no New Delhi leg, and that is already the main talking point.
The US Secretary of State starts the week in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for Central Asia meetings, according to the State Department. From there he goes to Mumbai and Jamnagar in Gujarat, with the whole trip running October 17 to 22. A few outlets put the start of the India portion at October 19, so the exact day he lands is worth double-checking.
India's Ministry of External Affairs said on Friday that External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will hold talks with him on October 20.
That Friday confirmation came late. US Ambassador Sergio Gor had told a Bloomberg event in Mumbai on Thursday that Washington "expects" Jaishankar to be there when Rubio is in the city. In the same appearance he said Rubio will meet people from Reliance in Jamnagar, including chairman Mukesh Ambani, and called the trip business focused.
Delhi had said nothing until then.
Congress noticed. Jairam Ramesh, the party's communications chief, asked since when an Indian minister's meetings are announced by someone other than the ministry's own spokesperson. He reached back to May 2025 and the evening India found out from Rubio that Operation Sindoor had been halted. Pawan Khera was shorter: a foreign government calling India's foreign minister to Indian soil, he said, is a new low.
Rahul Gandhi's post on X on Friday got the most attention. "Mr Rubio has summoned his employee to Mumbai," it said. He also claimed ministry officials seemed confused about the arrangement and told Prime Minister Narendra Modi he might want to explain it. Then he added a line that read like a dare.
Neither the government nor the BJP had responded when this was filed.
Reliance runs the world's largest single-site refinery there, good for roughly 1.4 million barrels of crude a day. It is also where an unusual amount of US-India energy business now points.
In March Trump announced that America would build its first new refinery in decades, in Brownsville, Texas, with Reliance money behind it. CNBC tied Rubio's stop to US diesel prices going up. Bloomberg took a different angle and read the Ambani meeting as proof that relations with Reliance are fine despite a public jab Elon Musk took at the company this week. Gandhi, never one to skip a chance, answered Musk with "Welcome to India, Elon."
The State Department's own line is plainer. It says Rubio is coming to deepen energy cooperation and push commercial investment, and that he'll sit down with business leaders.
This is Rubio's second India trip since May. He was in New Delhi then for the Quad foreign ministers' meeting, with Jaishankar hosting, and he came out of it calling India one of America's most important strategic partners. He said he expected a broader trade deal to be wrapped up soon.
It hasn't been.
Some background. Trump had taken tariffs on Indian goods to 50 percent, half of it a penalty for buying Russian oil. A framework for an interim deal in February brought that down to 18 percent. Weeks later the US Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs, and negotiators lost momentum. Reuters quoted a person familiar with the talks who said Washington felt India was dragging its feet and assumed it could get a good deal without giving much.
Russian oil is the other sore spot. After the US-Israel war on Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the US eased sanctions pressure on buyers of Russian crude. India, one of the biggest, has kept buying.
Pakistan and China sit in the background as well. Delhi has watched Washington get friendlier with Islamabad over recent months, and Trump's own trip to Beijing earlier this year didn't help.
Jaishankar and Rubio meet on October 20. Whether the ministry puts out its own readout or leaves the telling to the Americans again will say something about how this week is going. Jamnagar is where any Reliance announcement tied to US energy projects would most likely come.
Rubio is due to wrap up the trip on October 22.
