New Delhi: Talks for the trade agreement between India and the US are in the final stages despite changes on the American end, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday.
New Delhi is focused on a deal that is beneficial, balanced and provides an advantage over comparable economies, he said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.
The Democratic victory in the US mid-term elections will “change many things” in the bilateral relationship between the two nations, the MEA acknowledged. While there is bipartisan support for elements of the relationship, such as defence and security cooperation, India will focus on the US administration when it comes to the trade negotiations, he said.
“It’s certainly our hope and our…anticipation that we are at the last stretch [of the talks for the trade deal]. That’s not a secret,” Jaishankar said, noting that the “bulk of the issues” have been sorted out.
“There is the last stretch of issues and in many cases, these concerns are not so much at our end because the changes have been more at the American end than our end,” he said.
“The hope is that we should close it out soon. It’s always the case that in that last period, everybody’s impatient,” Jaishankar said, refusing to set a timeframe for the conclusion of negotiations. “For us, the key is that we want a trade deal which is beneficial, balanced and which would give us a comparative advantage over groups of comparable economies,” he added.
Donald Trump looks to finalise a set of trade deals to improve markets for the US and the challenge has been finding a landing point.
“This is not something which could have been done quickly and magically, with sort of bold thinking and rapid movement, because these are very serious issues – people’s jobs and people’s lives are at stake,” Jaishankar said.
According to him, India is going tariff line by tariff line, which takes time and is painstaking. “I think having put in that effort, we have now reached…almost the finishing line. I think, bear with it and hopefully we’ll get it,” he added.
The two countries have been negotiating a bilateral trade agreement since last year, when the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on Indian exports. The talks gained pace after the two sides reached an understanding earlier this year on slashing tariffs to 18%. The issue was complicated by the judiciary’s scrapping of Trump’s tariffs, though officials from both sides have said talks are now in their final stage.
On the issue of the results US mid-term elections, in which the Democrats took control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Jaishankar said he was chary about commenting on the domestic politics of other countries but added: “Will it change something? Of course, it would change something. It would change many things.
“Would it change our relationship? I would say, on many issues which we are working on, there is…a consensus, let us say, defence and security cooperation or the tech side. In a lot of this, these are not partisan issues in the US.”
Responding to a question on whether India is concerned by the US’s inconsistent approach towards China, he said: “We are all used to the manner in which politics and international relations run in this day and age, you factor that in.”
Speaking on India-China relations, Jaishankar said New Delhi has done a lot to address the asymmetry in crucial infrastructure along the border since the clash in Galwan Valley in June 2020, which took relations to a six-decade low.
While infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) was neglected till a decade ago, India ramped up the construction of infrastructure such as roads, bridges, tunnels and airfields, as well as the positioning of the armed forces through the allocation of greater resources and a policy push.
“What has happened today is the border with China has become more alive…It has required a much greater commitment of troops on a sustained basis. The fact is that the work we had already done allowed that kind of numbers to be deployed out there, and the work we continue to do will maintain those numbers,” he said in reference to the deployment of additional troops along the LAC since the military standoff of 2020.
“Since you spoke about Galwan, has our capability to maintain ourselves and deploy ourselves on that border become better? I would say very definitely yes. I would say in a very marked way it’s become better,” he said.
On the economic side, while the Indian and Chinese economies were about the same size in the late 1980s, Beijing pulled ahead through a huge push towards modernisation and industrialisation. On the other hand, India “missed the bus” in the 1980s. India’s economic reforms in the 1990s were not carried through, sector by sector, to build greater capacities, he said.
“Today we are making phones in this country. Why were we not making them 20 years ago? Take semiconductors. We had semiconductor plants going back to the 1990s. Why didn’t we build up a semiconductor industry?” Jaishankar said. “The fact is, there were decades where we missed out…You can’t play catch up by following the same track. You have to do leap-frogging,” he said.
The asymmetry with China on artificial intelligence (AI) was “more complicated” than simply having semiconductors, energy and computing power, the MEA acknowledged.
“If you see the embrace of digital capabilities and practices in the last decade, actually we have raced ahead. In many ways, today we are a far more digital society than many developed economies and societies,” Jaishankar said.
