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 on Friday.
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.
Jaishankar’s remarks come as Trump’s policy on tariffs has triggered massive trade disruptions and fears of a global economic recession.
On Wednesday, Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs on all countries, except China.
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 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.