NEW DELHI: Slamming the government on the India-US interim trade agreement, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said on Tuesday that the arrangement looked more like a “pre-committed purchase agreement” that overturned every principle of reciprocity between the two countries. He added that Union ministers S Jaishankar and Piyush Goyal were playing “ping pong” when questions are posed to them about the deal.
Initiating debate in the Lok Sabha on the Union Budget, Tharoor said the government’s claim that India secured a better deal than what China, Vietnam, or other Asian economies got did not withstand scrutiny. “While India may have obtained tariff reductions of one or two percentage points, no East Asian economy has agreed to deliberately dilute its trade surplus with the United States through guaranteed purchase commitments,” he said.
The Thiruvananthapuram MP asked how one could speak of a “reciprocal tariff” of 18 per cent on one side and zero per cent on the other.
At a time when India’s total bilateral trade with the US stands at roughly $130 billion and a trade surplus of nearly $45 billion, the government has surprisingly promised to buy $500 billion worth of American goods in five years, he said.
Tharoor argued in the House that this effectively converts a surplus into a long-term deficit by an executive assurance rather than through market demand. “No major economy has ever neutralised its own trade leverage in this manner.
While the US continues to impose import tariffs of up to 18 per cent on Indian exports, we have committed ourselves to lower tariffs to near-zero levels, open agriculture, dilute data localisation, soften intellectual-property safeguards, and even redirect strategic energy imports, especially away from Russia, to meet purchase targets. This is not strategic balancing; it is economic pre-emption,” the Congress MP said.
He said Parliament had neither been told how farmers, MSMEs, and the domestic industry would be protected nor why India “voluntarily surrendered” its negotiating power.
Trade agreement ‘one-sided’, will hurt farming community, says Akhilesh
Echoing Tharoor’s view, Samajwadi Party supremo Akhilesh Yadav dubbed the interim trade agreement with the United States as “one-sided” and alleged that it will hurt the farming community as agricultural imports will hit farming in India. Participating in the discussion in the Lok Sabha, he also said the agreement will damage the prospects of the industry and push back the ‘Made in India’ and ‘self-reliant India’ initiatives of the government.