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.

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