‘Ties survived many challenges': India amid Donald Trump's tariff threat
Responding to the US's 25% reciprocal tariff that becomes effective on August 7 and an unspecified additional penalty for purchasing Russian oil, external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told a weekly media briefing that India remains focused on the 'substantive agenda' that the two sides have agreed on to drive the relationship. He also pointed to the potential for growing the 'strong defence partnership' with the US.
At the same time, Jaiswal defended India's procurement of energy and defence hardware from Russia, saying New Delhi and Moscow have a 'steady and time-tested partnership'. He also made it clear that defence requirements are determined by India's national security imperatives and strategic assessments.
'India and the US share a comprehensive global strategic partnership anchored in shared interests, democratic values and robust people-to-people ties. This partnership has weathered several transitions and challenges,' Jaiswal said in response to several questions regarding Trump's tariff policy.
'We remain focused on the substantive agenda that our two countries have committed to and are confident that the relationship will continue to move forward,' he said.
The India-US defence partnership has strengthened over the last several years and decades, he said. 'There is potential for this partnership to grow further under the India-US COMPACT for the 21st century,' he added, referring to the COMPACT or Catalyzing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce & Technology arrangement that was finalised when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Trump in Washington in February.
People familiar with the matter said the Indian side is drawing a distinction between the actions of Trump and the institutionalised relationship between India and the US, which is not limited to trade. At the same time, the Indian side is mindful of the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the American leader's decisions, the people said on condition of anonymity.
'The relationship is not just about trade. It is also about defence, technology, students, people-to-people ties, the mobility of professionals and shared interests in the Indo-Pacific,' one of the people said. 'We have endured worse patches in the past, such as after India's nuclear tests in 1998.'
Jaiswal's remarks came a day after commerce minister Piyush Goyal told Parliament that India will take 'all necessary steps' to secure its national interest in the wake of the reciprocal tariff unveiled by Trump. Goyal said the government is examining the implications of the development and is engaged with all stakeholders, including exporters and industry, to assess the situation.
In an initial response to Trump's punitive tariff on India, the commerce ministry said India and the US are engaged in negotiations for concluding a 'fair, balanced and mutually beneficial' trade deal and New Delhi remains committed to that objective. At the same time, the government pledged to protect the interests of Indian farmers, entrepreneurs and MSMEs.
Trump has unleashed a barrage of social media posts this week, reiterating his claim that India's tariffs are among the world's highest and criticising India for having the 'most strenuous and obnoxious' trade barriers and for buying a majority of its military equipment and energy from Russia. 'I don't care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care,' he said on social media.
While announcing a trade deal with Islamabad, Trump mockingly suggested that Pakistan could sell oil to India once the neighbouring country's energy reserves are developed with US assistance. He has also continued repeating his claim that he brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan in May, when hostilities erupted after New Delhi launched a military operation to target terrorist infrastructure in territories controlled by Islamabad in retaliation for the Pahalgam terror attack. The Indian side has said no foreign country had a role in the stopping of military actions.
In the context of India-Russia relations, Jaiswal said India's bilateral relationships with various countries 'stand on their own merit and should not be seen from the prism of a third country'. He added: 'India and Russia have a steady and time-tested partnership.'
Jaiswal said the sourcing of India's defence requirements is 'determined solely by our national security imperatives and strategic assessments'.
After US and its Western partners slapped wide-ranging sanctions on Russia over invasion of Ukraine, India ramped up purchase of Russian commodities, especially oil and fertilisers. Russia soon displaced Iraq and Saudi Arabia as the main suppliers of crude to India, the world's third largest oil importer.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Economic Times
16 minutes ago
- Economic Times
India needs concentrated tooling hubs for advanced manufacturing for aerospace and space domain: S Somanath
Synopsis S Somanath called for the establishment of dedicated manufacturing hubs across India, stressing the critical absence of a comprehensive aerospace manufacturing framework. He underscored the pressing demand for skilled technicians in tooling and related sectors, while also highlighting the supply chain challenges that impede India's rocket production capabilities. ANI S Somanath Former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman S Somanath on Tuesday said there is an urgent need to develop tooling hubs in India to truly scale advanced manufacturing. He emphasised that India must create focused, concerted manufacturing ecosystems similar to those in China. Speaking at the Accel Advanced Manufacturing Summit in Bengaluru, Somanath said India lacks an ecosystem for aerospace manufacturing. 'Distributed hubs across the country are not a good idea for sectors like aerospace. We need concentrated hubs where all players are aggregated, coupled with institutions that add value to research and innovation,' he said. He highlighted that specialised skills such as tooling are often not addressed in the domain. 'We need people with great knowledge in tooling processes, metallurgy, materials manufacturing, machine tools, process engineering, and automation,' he said, while discussing India's next decade building frontier tech also pointed out that while Indian rockets are witnessing strong global demand, the lack of sufficient supply remains a bottleneck that needs immediate attention. 'Manufacturing becomes the crux of the problem. The ability to manufacture and launch in a short period is essential,' he told startups looking to build in the space sector, highlighting that mass manufacturing in satellites and small launch vehicles will be needed to capture the global startups and deeptech investors also echoed his thoughts and said that for India, space as a defence technology has come much later, and there are areas where it still needs to play catch-up. Agnikul Cosmos CEO Srinath Ravichandran said the way to address the gap is not to mimic the SpaceX model but to build from scratch. 'Everyone wants to go build a SpaceX, but that may not be the easiest way to build rockets,' he said, adding that instead of replicating the model, solutions can be built from the Indian context for the Rajaram, managing partner at deeptech venture capital firm Speciale Invest, which has backed several spacetech startups, believes, 'There are certain places we (India) can leapfrog, like in-orbit servicing or any action that you can do in orbit. That's very much a level playing field. Maybe the West is just two or three years ahead of us, and India can compete there.'
Economic Times
16 minutes ago
- Economic Times
Accel-backed Bluestone Jewellery cuts India IPO size
India's Bluestone Jewellery and Lifestyle has trimmed the size of its initial public offering, a prospectus showed on Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT The Accel India-backed company will now issue fresh shares worth 8.2 billion rupees (about $93 million), down from 10 billion rupees earlier. Its existing shareholders, including venture capital firms Accel India and Kalaari Capital, will now sell 13.9 million shares in the offering, lower than the 24 million shares proposed earlier. Bluestone will launch the IPO on August 11 and close bids on August 13. Anchor investors will bid for the share sale on August 8. The jeweller was seeking a valuation of at least 120 billion rupees ($1.37 billion) in the IPO, Reuters reported in December, citing sources. The overall IPO size was slated to be around 30 billion rupees, the sources had said. The company may consider issuing specified securities, in consolidation with bookrunning lead managers, aggregating up to 2 billion rupees in pre-IPO placement, its draft prospectus from December said. ADVERTISEMENT The company, which sells diamond, gold, platinum and studded jewellery, competes with Titan, Kalyan Jewellers and Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri among listed firms in India. Proceeds from the offering will be used to fund working capital requirements and general corporate purposes, the Bluestone prospectus showed. ADVERTISEMENT Axis Capital, IIFL Capital and Kotak Mahindra Capital are its bookrunning lead managers. ($1 = 87.7790 Indian rupees) ADVERTISEMENT (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
Hindustan Times
19 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
For Pakistan & US, it is back to doing business
There is a discernible sense of satisfaction within Pakistan's strategic fraternity at the undeniable uptick in the US-Pakistan interface over the past few months. Some may dispute the extent, but given how the relationship had eroded in the past decade-and-a-half, any improvement represents a big change. Given the transactional nature that dominates the US, there is the temptation to find direct factors for the upswing in US-Pakistan relations. (AP) The principal milestones of the US-Pakistan downturn are well known. For Pakistan, the US detection and killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 in Abbottabad was a betrayal and a public humiliation. For many Pakistanis, that the US acted clandestinely deep inside Pakistan superseded the enormity of the fact that Osama had been living there all the time under the very noses of the Pakistan military. The free fall continued with mounting US frustrations over Pakistan's double game in Afghanistan. President Trump's 2018 New Year Day tweet exemplified this view. The tweet underlined US foolishness in giving Pakistan billions of dollars in aid in return for deceit and lies! This was consistent with emergent US narratives about Pakistan, but that it was from the President himself made it doubly significant. Through the Biden tenure matters crystallised at a low plateau of bad blood and mutual recriminations. The US's final withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 in disorder and disarray added another layer to the deep strategic mistrust and suspicion that now characterised the relationship. President Biden did not have even a telecon with Imran Khan during the time he was PM and Imran Khan in turn blamed the US for his premature ouster from power. In the meantime, most US military and security assistance was suspended. What perhaps hurt Pakistan the most was the impact this had on training programmes for Pakistan military officers in the US. All this happened also when the India-US relationship seemed effortlessly to go from strength to strength. This further highlighted the distance between Washington and Islamabad. The past few months appear quite different. The change was animated quite dramatically by Field Marshal Asim Munir being hosted by President Trump in June 2025 in the immediate aftermath of Operation Sindoor. It is most unusual — perhaps even unprecedented — for a US president to host a chief of a foreign military who is not a head of State or government. This shift also coincides with new ambiguities in the US-India interface — perhaps triggered by President Trump's constant reiteration of having prevented further escalation in the India-Pakistan conflict during Operation Sindoor. To many in Pakistan, this has 'internationalised' Kashmir and highlighted the importance of third-party intervention as equally that even the US was skeptical about India's claims and demands. There had been earlier indicators of change beginning with President Trump's acknowledgement of Pakistan's counter-terrorism assistance in his State of the Union Address in March 2025. The allocation of a significant financial package as assistance to Pakistan for maintaining its F16 aircraft despite an otherwise stringent foreign aid cutback, was another. Alongside, more even-handed references to the India-Pakistan dynamic, meetings and telephone conversations between the US secretary of State and senior Pakistan leaders further underlined this shift. The announcement of a US-Pakistan Trade Agreement, albeit with a 19% tariff on imports from Pakistan, and Trump's enthusiastic references to hydrocarbon exploration and investment, are but the latest in this trend. The trade agreement may not be the best deal Pakistan could have got, but it is not as bad as could have been, and in any case some deal was better than no deal as far as the government of Pakistan was concerned. It may well be argued that there is nothing particularly significant in these transitions, but for most Pakistanis they suggest a return of their country to the US's radar after a long period of being out in the cold. What explains this shift? Given the transactional frame of mind that dominates the US, there is always the temptation to look for a direct and material factor. Numerous reasons are, therefore, assigned for this shift in US policy. Pakistan's counter-terrorism potential and the assistance it can offer is one. That the US is keen to have some relationship with Pakistan given the growing spread of China in the region is another. There is also the view that recommendations of the US Central Command on Pakistan's military potential vis-à-vis Iran in terms of its geographical location and the value of its air bases may have registered on the Presidency amid the current situation in West and South West Asia. Some argue that this shift in policy was also pushed along by crypto currency deals, and by US interest in potential Pakistani reserves of rare earth minerals. Each of these explanations may have some merit but perhaps the weight of any or all of these should not be exaggerated. Instead, it is useful to refocus on some basics. Pakistan is the fifth largest country in the world in terms of population with some 250 million people. It is riven by instability. It has nuclear weapons. It is situated in a sensitive geo-political location, almost in a global fault line. Given these attributes it was always only a matter of time that the long downturn in US Pakistan relations would reverse and US interest in Pakistan would reignite. We are at that stage now. All major powers decide on policies based on an appreciation of their own interests and their own understandings of evolving situations. To think that the long downturn in US Pakistan relations would have simply continued or that the US would see developments from our perspective alone is, and never was, a realistic assessment. We should take this shift in our stride. If some in India feel betrayed or dismayed at this turn of events, they have only themselves to blame. TCA Raghavan is a former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan. The views expressed are personal.
