India prepared for high degree of urgency: S Jaishankar on trade deal with US

Two days after US President Donald Trump gave a 90-day breather on imposing reciprocal tariffs, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday said that India was prepared for a high degree of urgency on having a trade deal and this time around, it was New Delhi that was showing the urgency and not the other way around.

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Jaishankar went on to warn that the world was barrelling towards 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.

Speaking at the Global Tech Summit hosted by the Ministry of External Affairs and Carnegie,  Jaishankar said that India's trade deals were very challenging as the US was very ambitious. The minister said, "Normally, a complaint in the past which was made about us was that we are the guys slowing it down. Today, it’s the other way around. We are trying to communicate that urgency.” India and the US have conceptually agreed on having a bilateral trade agreement by Sept-Oct this year. “We will find a fix which will work for both," he added.

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. A US delegation led by Assistant Trade Representative Brendan Lynch visited Delhi (March 26-29) to hammer out the details.

The US, Jaishankar said, had fundamentally changed its approach to engaging with the world, and it had consequences across every domain. Jaishankar added that just as the US had a view of India, India, too, had a view of them. "We did four years of talking in the first Trump administration. They have their view of us and frankly, we have our view of them,” he said.

On the issue of trade talks with the European Union, the minister said, "People often say that we've been negotiating for 30 years. This is not entirely true because we had big blocks of time and nobody was even talking to each other. But, trade talks have tended to be very protracted processes."

Jaishankar said that Japan, South Korea and China had sought to make a geopolitical comeback through technology. "I think in many ways, Japan particularly, South Korea to some extent, have also sought through the tech world means of a geopolitical comeback.

In all this, he said, India was making progress in the Digital Public Infrastructure and was giving priority to semiconductors.

Jaishankar said that at the Global Tech Summit, one could see the technological side of the country in a positive way.