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New Delhi [India], April 11 (ANI): Amid the tariffs imposed by the Donald Trump administration on countries across the world including India, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday said that the US has fundamentally changed its approach to engaging with the world and that this shift has prompted India to seek out more complementary partners, which are the open market economies in the West.
Addressing the Carnegie Global Tech Summit 2025 in the national capital, Jaishankar said that the US-imposed tariffs have focused India on the need to actually correct “a certain skewed nature of our openness to the global economy.”
“I would argue we today have an opportunity to take the current situation and if we can focus on the three big negotiations we have underway with the US, the EU, and with the UK, I would say if these really work out for us in this year we would be in a very different position,” Jaishankar said.
US President Donald Trump had on April 9 put a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs imposed on countries across the world, including the 26 per cent tariffs on India, with the exception of China on which he imposed a total of 145 per cent duties.
To a question from the audience on whether the US could be trusted to put substance into trust in various fields in the context of the recent disruptions caused by its tariffs, Jaishankar said that he thinks it can “even when the other T is concerned.”
“Within a month of the change in administration we actually conceptually have an agreement that we will do a bilateral trade agreement, that we will find a fix which will work for both of us because both of us we have our concerns too,” the External Affairs Minister said.
He noted that the negotiations for the bilateral trade agreement is not an open-ended process.
Jaishankar said that India is prepared for a high degree of urgency in reaching a trade deal with regards to the United States, a country which he said has fundamentally changed its approach to engaging with the world and it has consequences across every domain.
Jaishankar said the global landscape is very different from what it was a year ago.
Noting that India was unable to conclude a trade deal with the US during Trump’s first term, Jaishankar said: “This time around, we are certainly geared up at a very high degree of urgency. We see a window here, we want to seize that window. Our trade teams are really charged up.”
Jaishankar added that just as the US has a view of India, India too has a view of them. “We talked for four years during the first Trump administration. They have their view of us, and frankly, we have our view of them. The bottom line is that they didn’t get that. So if you look at the EU, often people say we’ve been negotiating for 30 years, which is not entirely true because we had big blocks of time and nobody was even talking to each other. But they have tended to be very protracted processes,” he said.
Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to meet US President Donald Trump in February 2025, India and the US announced that they will hold talks for a bilateral trade agreement and a joint statement set a deadline around September of this year for both sides to be able to design a workable framework. An American team recently visited New Delhi and finalised the terms for negotiations on the trade deal.
Responding to a question at the Carnegie India Global Technology Summit, Jaishankar said the Indian negotiators “are people who are very much on top of their game very ambitious about what they want to achieve.”
“We are trying to get the other side to kind of speed it up,” Jaishankar said, pointing out that in the past other countries used to say that India was slowing down the negotiations.
“It used to be said that we were the guys who are slowing it down and actually it is now the other way around.”
The External Affairs Minister said that “at least so far the US has been fairly quick to respond to what’s been tabled but we will now have to see how that picks up.”
“It will be profound not just because the US is the largest economy, the main driver, in a way, of global tech advancements but also because it’s very clear that tech has a big role in making America great again. So there is a connection between MAGA and tech, which perhaps was not so clear between 2016 and 2020.”
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held talks in London on the trade agreement with her British counterpart Rachel Reeves on Thursday. Both sides affirmed their shared commitment to accelerating work on the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT).
With respect to the European Union, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal today said that the Government is working to expedite the conclusion of a free trade agreement with the European Union. Speaking at the Italy-India Business, Science and Technology Forum, he said that India has emerged as a key market for European Union members. He said that India presents an opportunity to expand manufacturing at scale for the global market.
Meanwhile, speaking at the Carnegie Global Summit today, External Affairs Minister said, “If one were to turn our attention to Europe, I think, again here, the change in the last year has been very sharp. Five years ago, I think Europe probably had the best geopolitical situation. It had worked out the ideal triangulation between the United States, Russia and China. Today, every side of that triangle is under stress. And perhaps there’s a lesson in it, sometimes very intricate hedging. From the best of all worlds, you can end up as the most difficult of all worlds. But again, I want to stress here that there are very important tech aspects to Europe’s predicament and, in fact, to our own interaction with Europe. This year, just a month ago, we had 21 European Commissioners visiting us. I think if you correlate the intensity today of India-EU relations, there is, I think, clearly sort of factoring in both of their predicament as well as of the way India looks at possibilities which have opened up after that.”
Jaishankar also touched upon the advances of China in the evolving global geo-tech landscape.
He noted that trade and technology influence US-China trade dynamics, and China’s decisions are as consequential as those of the US.
“So the changes in the United States, which all of you are as familiar, if not more than me, I think is one big shift in the last year. But there’s the other shift and that’s an evolution, you can say. It’s something which appears, even if it is not, more of an unfolding rather than dramatic event. And that is the advancement of China.”
“What we saw in many ways as the trade story has also been the tech story. And it’s had its dramatic moments. DeepSeek was one. But I would argue that the changes impelled by China are as consequential as the shifts in the American position. In fact, one is, to some extent, influenced by the other,” Jaishankar said.
The Global Technology Summit, the flagship dialogue on geo-technology, is co-hosted by Ministry of External Affairs. (ANI)
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