New Delhi: The India-US trade deal was close to completion, but fell through because Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not call President Donald Trump, America’s Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has suggested.
“What I would do is I would negotiate the contracts and set the whole deal up. But let’s be clear, it’s his deal. Yeah, okay, he’s the closer, he does the deal. So I said you got to have Modi [call]. It’s all set up. You have to have Modi call the President. And they were uncomfortable doing it so Modi didn’t call,” Lutnick said Thursday on the All-In Podcast.
He added: “So that Friday left the middle of the next week, we did Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. We announced a whole bunch of deals in Asia. So we did these whole bunch of deals. …That’s staircase and they were at and because we negotiated them and assumed India was gonna be done before them I had negotiated them at a higher rate So now the problem is the deals came out at a higher rate right and then India calls back it says oh, okay We’re ready I said ready for what?”
The latest remarks by Lutnick indicate the sequence of events from Washington’s view as to why the trade deal has yet to be announced and negotiations have since stalled. India faces 50 percent tariffs on its exports to the US—one of the highest faced by any country in gaining access to the American market.
Lutnick’s comments also come a day after Senator Lindsey Graham announced that Trump has “greenlit” a bill that would authorise the President to impose up to 500 percent tariffs on any country continuing to purchase Russian oil, including India, China, and Brazil. India has already been penalised by the US for its continuing trade with Russia, with an additional tariff of 25 percent imposed at the end of August last year.
“India just was, you know, on the wrong side of the seesaw…It was just they couldn’t get it done when they needed to, and then they couldn’t get it done, and then they couldn’t get it done, and then they couldn’t get it done. And so what happened is all these other countries kept doing deals, and they’re just further in the back of the line, and now when they say, but what I want is, I want the deal in between the UK and Vietnam, right? Because that’s what I negotiate, right? And they remember, and I remember they say, but, but you agreed? And I said, then. Not now,” Lutnick said.
The US Secretary of Commerce emphasised that India was too late in accepting the deal on offer, pointing out that every deal is like a staircase, and every country that comes after the previous one has a different deal to agree to.
“I’ll tell you a story about India. So if you remember, so I did the first deal with the UK, and we told the UK that they had to get it done by two Fridays from now, that that was the date, that the train was going to leave the station by two Fridays, because I have a lot of other countries doing things, and if someone else is first, they’re first. And President Trump does deals like a staircase. The first stair gets the best deal. You can’t get the best deal after the first guy went,” Lutnick explained.
“And we were talking [to] India, and we told India you had three Fridays to get it done. Well, they have to get it done, because what happens is I have lots of other countries, and when those other countries do their deal, the staircase goes up. And now the president, during all these deals, he would refer to me as the greatest table setter who ever lived.”
India has maintained that it has offered its final deal for the “first tranche” of the bilateral trade agreement, which American Trade Representative Jamieson Greer described as the “best ever” last month. However, no further physical rounds of negotiations are expected and the deal is yet to be accepted by the US.
For New Delhi, the “first tranche” of the deal must include the reduction of the Russian oil tariff rate of 25 percent. India has seen a marked decrease in the purchase of Russian oil—roughly a 10 percent decrease. The US has sanctioned Rosneft and Lukoil—two of Russia’s largest oil firms.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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