Sitharaman says India–US trade talks have reached a plateau

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday that talks on an India–US trade agreement have reached a plateau, and that further giving or taking may be very difficult even though the negotiation is still open.

She was speaking at the Munich Leaders Meeting in New Delhi. “It’s been a hard and very rigorously negotiated agreement. The agreement negotiations are still ongoing, although we’d like to believe that both the sides have reached a plateau beyond which giving or taking might be very, very difficult. But maybe if there are rooms to operate from, both sides would do it,” she said.

She also said the accepted way to handle a trade imbalance was a negotiation with some give and take, and that tariffs were now being used as a weapon. The trade balance, she said, is in India’s favour, and Washington wants that gap reduced.

Greer’s “short strokes” and her plateau

The remark sits against a more optimistic line from the US side days earlier. Trade representative Jamieson Greer, after meeting commerce minister Piyush Goyal on the margins of the G20 trade ministers’ meeting in Milwaukee, said the deal was in the short strokes but not imminent. He said the two sides had identified the universe of sticking points and were working through them. He also said President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi could speak again soon.

Sitharaman did not contradict the claim that talks continue. She contradicted the implied pace. A plateau, in the sentence she used, is a point where the next concession is hard for both sides. Short strokes, in Greer’s sentence, is a point where the remaining list is short. Both can be true if the short list is made of items neither capital will move. That is the reading her wording invites.

Goyal has just finished a week in the United States. The Milwaukee meeting with Greer was the set-piece of that trip. Sitharaman’s comment is the finance ministry’s public temperature after that round, not a formal close of the negotiation. She left a door: if there is room to operate, both sides would use it.

The imbalance she named

She was explicit about the US motive. The deficit sits on the American side of the India ledger, and reducing it is part of what Washington wants from the deal. She then used India’s own books to reject imbalance as a reason for one-sided tariffs. The deficit with China, she said, has grown exponentially since 2014. A country cannot treat that number as the only test, she argued. It has to talk, and it has to give and take.

The tariff line was aimed at the method, not at a single product. Negotiation, she said, used to be the platform on which countries put discrepancies. The imbalance is now being pursued by other means, and the tariff has become a weapon. She did not, in the reported remarks, name a US tariff line item or a percentage. The policy point is the one she stated: give and take inside a negotiation, rather than a duty imposed to force the same result.

What a plateau changes this week

Nothing in her remarks announces a breakdown. Nothing in them announces a signing date. The operable change is the public expectation. A deal described by the US trade representative as in the short strokes, and by the Indian finance minister as on a plateau, is a deal whose remaining items are political rather than technical. Those items move when the two leaders move them, which is why Greer’s mention of a possible Trump–Modi call is the other half of Monday’s record.

Until that call, or until Goyal and Greer publish a joint line, the text exporters and importers have is Sitharaman’s. The negotiation is open. The easy concessions, in her account, are already on the table. The next movement has to come from a room she says may still exist, and that she would not promise.