The Trump administration was quick in responding to what was tabled for a bilateral trade pact with India and New Delhi is geared up for a "very high" degree of urgency in concluding trade deals with the US and the European Union, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said here on Friday.
He also cautioned that the world is barreling toward deep turmoil and economic upheaval amid escalating tensions between the US and China over tariffs, and that India must be ready to safeguard its interests.
His remarks came days after US President Donald Trump temporarily eased tariffs on several trading partners, including India, only to slap China with steeper levies — a move that rattled global markets and reignited fears of a full-blown trade war.
Beijing responded with defiance and tariffs of its own, pledging to "fight to the end". With both countries waiting for the other to blink first, the rest of the world is staring at a prolonged economic standoff.
In an interactive session at the Global Technology Summit, Jaishankar said the US under President Donald Trump has fundamentally changed its approach to engaging with the world and it has consequences across every key domain, especially in the technology sector.
In his remarks, Jaishankar, without sharing any specific details of negotiations between India and the US on the proposed trade pact, indicated that New Delhi was keen to conclude it as early as possible.
"Within a month of change in the administration, we have conceptually an agreement that we will do a bilateral trade agreement; that we will find a fix that will work for both of us because we have our concerns too. And its not an open-ended process," the minister said.
"We did four years of talking with the first Trump administration. They have their view of us and frankly we have our view of them. The bottom line is that the deal did not get through," he said.
Jaishankar also referred to India's negotiations with the European Union(EU)for a free trade agreement. "If you look at the EU, often people say we've been negotiating for 23 years which is not entirely true because we had big blocks of time when nobody was even talking to somebody else. But they have tended to be very protracted processes," he said.
"This time around, we are certainly geared up for a very high degree of urgency. I mean, we see a window here. Our trade teams are really charged up," he said.
"These (Indian negotiators) are people very much on top of their game, very ambitious about what they want to achieve," he said.
"We are trying to in each case get the other side to speed it up. This was
normally a complaint which was to be made about us in the past, that we were the guys slowing it down," he said, adding, "It's actually the other way around today. We are trying to communicate that urgency to all three accounts (the US, EU, the UK)."
"My sense probably is in terms of other parties' response — at least the US has been so far fairly quick to respond to whatever has been tabled. Now we have to see after April 2 how that picks up," he said.
Jaishankar also addressed the implications of the tit-for-tat tariff exchange between the two largest global economies. "Nothing is only trade anymore. Nothing is purely business anymore. Everything is also personal," he said.
He reflected on India’s experience navigating the often turbulent dynamics of US-China relations in the past.
"Our experiences (with respect to US-China relations) are very different. We've actually seen both extremes," the minister said.
"For the first few decades after independence, there was very sharp contestation between the US and China, and we got caught in the middle of it. And then, even worse, a deep collaboration between the US and China and being at the wrong end of it."
"So it's kind of like a Goldilocks problem," he quipped, suggesting that neither situation has worked in India’s favour.
With geopolitical and economic boundaries increasingly blurred, Jaishankar said India needs to redefine what it considers strategically important.
"In the past, we could insulate sectors, saying, you know, this doesn't matter; this is only trade, it's not political, it's not defence, it's not sensitive. I think what is our definition of what is sensitive has expanded."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump, during a February meeting with Trump in Washington, had agreed to finalise the first tranche of a bilateral trade deal by the fall. A US delegation led by Assistant Trade Representative Brendan Lynch visited Delhi last month to hammer out the details.
