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Stunned to see their own exports punished harshly, Indians are picking through the wreckage for signs of hope. There’s some but not a lot.
Alex Travelli, based in New Delhi, is the South Asia business and economics correspondent.
April 4, 2025Updated 2:25 p.m. ET
Sizing up what President Trump’s new tariffs mean for India was a puzzle from the start for even the country’s top trade economists. Its politicians, too, were stunned.
Starting next week, nearly all Indian goods arriving in the United States will be taxed an extra 27 percent.
The figure was bafflingly high, in part because the government’s ministers had been flocking to Washington since Mr. Trump won re-election. From the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump addressed India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, in absentia while delivering the disappointing news, calling him “a great friend of mine.” But that wasn’t enough.
The Trump administration, in a White House document, accused India of using “uniquely burdensome” methods to “make it difficult or costly for American companies to sell their products in India.”
The Indian government has been left figuring out how to respond. The country does sell more to the United States than it buys — by about $46 billion last year.
But unlike the other Asian countries that run trade surpluses with the United States, India has an overall negative balance of trade. It buys more from the rest of the world than it sells. That would make adjusting its trade policies to appease Mr. Trump especially painful.
