US tariffs prompted India to seek more partners in West: Jaishankar

New Delhi: The new US tariff regime has prompted India to seek more complementary partners in the West and to look for more opportunities by concluding trade deals with the US, the UK and the European Union (EU), external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Friday.

The tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump have focused India’s attention on correcting “a certain skewed nature of our openness to the global economy” and seeking complementary partners, who are the open market economies in the West, Jaishankar said at the Global Technology Summit, the flagship dialogue on geo-technology that is co-hosted by external affairs ministry.

“We have today an opportunity to take the current situation and if we can focus on these three big negotiations we have underway – with the US, the EU and the UK – if these really work out for us in this year, we would be in a very different position,” Jaishankar said.

His remarks came two days after Trump paused customised reciprocal tariffs for countries around the world, including 26% duties on Indian goods, until July but kept in place a baseline tariff of 10% for all nations. The only country not exempted by Trump is China, which faces tariffs of 145%.

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When Jaishankar was asked if the US could be trusted with taking forward partnerships in crucial areas given the turmoil created by the recent tariffs, he replied that the American side has been “fairly quick” to respond to whatever has been tabled by India in negotiations for a bilateral trade agreement.

“Within a month of the change in [the US] administration, we actually have conceptually an agreement that we will do a bilateral trade agreement, that we will find a fix which will work for both of us because we have our concerns too,” he said, adding that the negotiations for the trade deal aren’t an open-ended process.

Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed at their meeting in Washington in February that the two sides will conclude the first tranche of a bilateral trade agreement by the fall. An American team recently visited New Delhi and finalised the terms for negotiations on the trade deal.

Noting that India was unable to conclude a trade deal with the US during Trump’s first term, Jaishankar said: “This time around, we are certainly geared up at a very high degree of urgency. We see a window here, we want to seize that window. Our trade teams are really charged up.

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“These [Indian negotiators] are people very much on top of their game, very ambitious about what they want to achieve.”

While other countries had complained in the past about India slowing down trade negotiations, it is now trying to “get the other side to speed it up”, he added.

Jaishankar noted that the US has fundamentally changed its approach to engaging the world and this has consequences in all domains, including technology because the American economy has been the main driver of advancements in this field. China’s advances in tech, such as the DeepSeek AI model, are as consequential as the US shift, he said.

Among the tech policy challenges is that “tech has made trade much more national security sensitive” and fused the discussions on reliable supply chains and trusted and transparent digital expertise. “It will make the traditional model of partnerships much more difficult to take forward,” he said.

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India has put in place policies in key sectors such as semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, and critical minerals, and signalled its intention to have a relook at the nuclear liability law as the existing one “has not instilled confidence in the international nuclear industry for nuclear projects to take place”, Jaishankar said.

“We’ve come to the conclusion that maybe now the liability law needs to be amended...because...what’s the good of having a great initiative if it doesn’t actually deliver results on the ground,” he said, pointing to the greater focus on nuclear energy to meet the needs of AI data centres.