Amid the heated nationwide debate on the reciprocal tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump on India and other nations, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar said on Wednesday that India is currently negotiating a Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) with America, which could be concluded by the fall of this year.

Asked how India is going to deal with the reciprocal tariffs at a media summit here, he said, “I don’t think it is possible to speak about the impact because we don’t know.”

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He said India’s strategy has been to engage with the US in concluding the BTA. “Our strategy is pretty clear; we decided that we will engage the Trump administration earlier on this set of issues, and we were very open with them, constructive with them as they were with us. What we agreed to do was try to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement by the fall of this year,” the minister added.

“To the best of my knowledge, and I could be corrected here, I think we are the only country after President Trump has resumed the presidency the second time, which has reached such an understanding (for a BTA) in principle,” Mr Jaishankar said.

Since tariffs have been imposed on almost every country, each is drawing up its own strategy to deal with the US, he said, adding, “In our case, our strategy has a goal, which is to see whether it is possible to actually deal with this situation by concluding a bilateral trade agreement, and I should add that in an interesting way, this has long been our objective.”

With the tariffs in place, he underscored that the present situation may have created the circumstances for such a serious conversation, but India had been pursuing a trade deal even during President Trump’s first term. “So, from the Indian perspective, working out a bilateral deal with the United States is not a negative or unwanted situation. On the contrary, it is something which has long been our objective,” he added.

Talking about Sino-Indian relations, the minister said the relationship was now much better than before. “The relationship is much better than before. I think the disengagement, particularly the Depsang Demchok, was important,” he said.

“We are now addressing, to some extent, the issues on the border because there has been a force build-up over a period of years. There were many other things that also happened during this period. Some of it was collateral for the situation. Some of it was a carryover from the Covid era,” Mr Jaishankar said. The relations between the two countries during 2020-2024 in the wake of the military stand-off at eastern Ladakh were not in anyone’s interest.

“For example, our direct flights stopped during Covid. They were not resumed. The Kailash Mansarovar Yatra stopped during Covid, it did not resume. So, I think there is work to be done. We are at it. We are trying to see whether a lot of this post-COVID and parallel to the border tension, the combination of these issues, how much we can progress on this. We are looking at it because, at the end of the day, we’ve always maintained that the situation that we saw between 2020-2024 was not in the interest of either country,” he said.