New Delhi, March 24 -- When an article in the New Yorker opined that, "Focusing on the spectacle at the expense of understanding what Trump and his allies are actually doing has led to some of the most epically wrong things in the history of American politics," Susan Glasser was obviously not even thinking about an imminent battle between the Donald Trump-backed but Elon Musk-owned AI handmaiden (a descriptor the US president might like) Grok and the government of India.

After all, this battle needs to be placed squarely in the realm of geopolitics-and optics. For Trump's most powerful right-hand man Musk, business must mix messily with politics to allow for enough bones and offal to satisfy the appetite that the two have displayed in th...