India is in dialogue with the US for a bilateral trade agreement, commerce minister Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday, a day after Donald Trump said the Delhi-Washington ties were ‘a totally one-sided relationship”.
"We are in dialogue with the US for a BTA," Goyal said at an industry chamber event on sustainability.
US trade secretary Scott Bessent had also on Monday told Fox News that: “"I think at the end of the day, two great countries will get this solved.”
In a post on TruthSocial, Trump had claimed on Monday that India has now "offered" to cut its tariffs to nothing, “but it’s getting late”, as he said that India buys most of its oil and military products from Russia and very little from the US.
“What few people understand is that we do very little business with India, but they do a tremendous amount of business with us. In other words, they sell us massive amounts of goods, their biggest ‘client,’ but we sell them very little—until now a totally one-sided relationship, and it has been for many decades,” Trump wrote.
The US and India have held five rounds of talks for the trade agreement but failed to reach an agreement.
While half of the Trump administration’s 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods has been attributed to Delhi buying crude oil for Russia, many analysts believe the real point of irritation for Washington is India’s refusal to allow full access for foreign goods to its vast consumer market.
India is believed to have drawn red lines around sectors like agricultural and dairy products.
Delhi has responded to the US punishment tariffs by making overtures to Russia and China. However, Bessent played down Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit as “performative”.