India wants to wait and see whether the Donald Trump administration takes further steps beyond the 10 per cent global tariff that the US President notified on Friday in response to the Supreme Court striking down his earlier, sweeping tariffs.
The secretary (east) in the external affairs ministry, P. Kumaran, indicated this hours before Trump raised the blanket tariff to 15 per cent.
Kumaran was briefing the media about the bilateral engagement between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Asked whether the two sides had discussed the developments in Washington following the US Supreme Court verdict, Kumaran said they had and added that the judgment’s implications too were discussed.
Kumaran said: “Both leaders agreed that it’s a rather new development and that both sides need to study the implications and wait for further developments by the US administration.”
He added: “We will essentially be in a wait-and-watch mode to see how the administration responds tothis judgment and whether any further steps are taken, and study the implications for our trade.”
India’s commerce ministry too had earlier indicated, in the first official reaction to the US court’s decision that came late on Friday night and the subsequent announcements from the White House and Trump’s comments, that it was studying the implications.
“We have noted the US Supreme Court judgment on tariffs yesterday. President Trump has also addressed a press conference in that regard,” the commerce ministry had said in a tersely worded statement.
“Some steps have been announced by the US administration. We are studying all these developments for their implications.”
The US embassy in New Delhi, asked what the global tariff announcement means for India given the trade deal that is in the works, said: “The President’s Proclamation imposes, for a period of 150 days, a 10 per cent ad valorem import duty on articles imported into the United States. The temporary import duty will take effect February 24 at 12.01am Eastern Standard Time.”
Trump had, at his news conference on Friday, been questioned specifically about the fate of the framework agreement on the India-US trade deal that is widely expected to be signed soon.
Asked if that deal with India would stand, Trump said: “Nothing changes. They will be paying tariffs and we will not be paying tariffs. The deal with India is, they pay tariffs. This is a reversal of what it used to be….
“India, and I think Prime Minister Modi is a great gentleman, a great man actually, but he was much smarter than the people he was against in the United States. He was ripping us off, so we made a deal with India and it’s a fair deal now.
“We are not paying tariffs to them and they are paying tariffs. We did a little flip. The India deal is on. All the deals are on. We’re just doing it differently.”
Asked whether he planned to travel to India for the Quad and his views on the relationship with India right now, Trump sidestepped the first question.
He used the second to again iterate his role in getting India and Pakistan to stop fighting during Operation Sindoor, although New Delhi has repeatedly said there was no third-party intervention.
“I think my relationship with India is fantastic. We are doing trade with India. India pulled out of Russia. India was getting its oil from Russia and they pulled way back at my request,” he said.
“My relationship with Prime Minister Modi is, I would say, great. I also stopped the war between India and Pakistan. Ten planes were shot down. That war was probably going nuclear and just yesterday the Prime Minister of Pakistan said President Trump saved 35 million lives by getting them to stop.
“I did it largely with tariffs. I said, ‘Look you want to fight, that’s fine but you are not going to do business with the United States. You are going to pay a 200 per cent tariff’ – each country – and they called up and they said, ‘We have made peace’.”
