After claiming credit for ending India’s military escalation with Pakistan last week, President Trump appeared to rankle New Delhi again on Thursday with comments about high-stakes U.S.-India trade negotiations and Apple’s production of iPhones in the country.
Mr. Trump, speaking to business leaders during his visit to Qatar, said India was nearing “a deal where basically they are willing to literally charge us no tariff,” without offering any details.
In response, S. Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, was careful not to contradict the president directly. “Trade talks have been going on,” Mr. Jaishankar told the Indian news media, adding that the negotiations “are very intricate” and “nothing is decided until everything is.”
Mr. Jaishankar emphasized that there would be no deal until India and the United States settled on one that is mutually beneficial. “Until that is done, I think any judgment on it would be premature,” he said.
India’s trade minister, Piyush Goyal, has been hopping back and forth between New Delhi and Washington almost nonstop since Mr. Trump took office in January in an effort to reach a tariff-related agreement by the fall. Mr. Goyal was leading a team headed back to the United States for another round of talks on Friday, the Reuters news agency reported.
India is hoping to reach a deal with the United States before Mr. Trump’s 90-day exemptions for reciprocal tariffs on most countries expire in July. Some Indian industries, like pharmaceutical firms and auto-parts makers, are eager to zero out tariffs with their American suppliers. Others, especially in agriculture, are heavily opposed to tariff-free American imports.
Mr. Trump on Thursday also knocked Apple’s efforts to move more of its iPhone production to India from China. He claimed he told Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, “I don’t want you building in India.”
This is not the effect of the U.S. trade war with China that India was hoping to see. Opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi mocked his closeness with an American president who boasts of directing high-tech production out of India.
Some Indian officials and commentators were still smarting from Mr. Trump’s freewheeling claims about the role that his administration played in brokering a truce between India and Pakistan after their most expansive military conflict in decades — comments that Indian officials flatly disputed.
Brahma Chellaney, a former adviser to India’s National Security Council and a commentator on foreign relations, thundered in a social media post on Thursday: “After bailing out Pakistan from the consequences of its export of Islamist terrorism, Trump rebukes Tim Cook for building iPhones in India.”
India has been fighting hard to expand manufacturing’s role in its economy, with not much to show for it. The iPhone has been a rare bright example, with perhaps 20 percent of its global production now finished in India, including millions of units assembled in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu alone.
Alex Travelli is a correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
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