Trade efforts in India seem to fizzle

Nation had hoped for deal before Trump visit

WASHINGTON — American dairy farmers, distillers and drugmakers have been eager to break into India, the world’s seventh-biggest economy but a tough-to-penetrate colossus of 1.3 billion people.

But talks between the Trump administration and New Delhi, intended to forge at least a modest deal in time for President Donald Trump’s visit that begins Monday, appear to have fizzled.

Barring some last-minute dramatics, a U.S.-India trade pact appears months away, if not longer.

“I’m really saving the big deal for later on,” Trump said this week. “I don’t know if it will be done before the election, but we’ll have a very big deal with India.”

The failure to reach a deal, despite the pressure of an approaching summit, may reflect not so much the differences between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the similarities.

“You’ve got two leaders who are looking at trade very much as a zero-sum game,” said Richard Rossow, a specialist in U.S.-India relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Regarded as a business reformer when he took office in 2014, Modi has increasingly turned protectionist. Last year, worried that India would be overwhelmed by Chinese imports, he abandoned a Pacific Rim trade agreement.

“U.S. behavior on the trade front has pushed India in the opposite direction of where we could like it to go,” Edward Alden, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told reporters Friday.

The Trump administration escalated pressure on India last year by denying some of its products preferential duty-free entry to the American market. In effect, that move raised tariffs on Indian imports.

The administration is annoyed by a deficit in the trade of goods with India that last year reached $23.3 billion.

Negotiations between U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and India’s commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, seemed to be advancing until about a week ago. Yet they failed to bridge their differences.

“I would have thought they would have been able to pull off a minideal,” said Safiya Ghori-Ahmad, an India specialist at the consulting firm McLarty Associates. “It seems there are a lot of sticky issues.”

Ajit Solanki The Associated Press An Indian worker installs a billboard welcoming President Donald Trump ahead of his visit in Ahmedabad, India. Trump is scheduled to visit the city during his India trip.