NEW DELHI: For Indian trade negotiators a Donald Trump victory will mean more pressures to open India to US exports. The problem is that a victory for his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, is also expected to mean pressures to open-up, though possibly shorn off the Trumpian intensity.
In hectic parleys ahead of the crucial elections, Trump’s team had tried to get Indian negotiators from the Ministries of Commerce and External Affairs to agree to a wide range of concessions by way of lowering tariff of farm products besides automobiles, telecom gear and solar technology products, in exchange for restoring duty free trade under the Generalised System of Preferences that the US had allowed India till last year. “The Trump administration is unpredictable. The mini trade deal was scuttled by them by insisting on a host of tariff lowering measures which our domestic compulsions did not allow for,” top commerce ministry officials pointed out.
The Trump administration’s ‘America First’ policy is seen as not discriminating between allies and countries the US considers as foes such as China. India and European Union both faced punitive trade measures in the run up to the US elections, though a tariff war with China was more in the news. “Though the US needs us for its strategic re-balancing in the Indo-Pacific, our assessment is that it will lean hard on us to open up markets, if President Trump wins. Not that we can expect a Biden team to act otherwise. However, one can expect them to be more predictable and there could be trade offs in other fields in negotiations with them,” said Pinak R Chakravarty, former secretary (economic relations).
Experts also believe that the need to re-balance US engagement in Asia in the light of China’s rise and the imperatives of Indo-US cooperation so far would exert their own pressures on whoever wins to do a trade deal with India.