Rise up against Modi Regime’s Ignominious Surrender to Trump’s Unilateral Trade Deal!
8 July 2025 being the deadline granted by Trump to India for a trade deal with the US, the Indian team led by commerce minister Piyush Goyal had a 2-day negotiation with the US team led by its Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Washington. While Goyal returned to India just two days back, with the commerce secretary still being in the US, Trump has unilaterally announced a major trade deal with India including a clear message to further “open up India”, though details are not elaborated. This is in continuation of Trump’s announcement of US-brokered Indo-Pak ceasefire in return for a US-India trade pact on 10 May. No doubt, the situation once again exposes the RSS-propelled Modi regime’s condemnable neocolonial servility to US imperialism.
Trump’s tariffs and non-tariff barriers on India including 26% steel and aluminium tariffs coupled with demand for unfettered access to the Indian market were part of his executive order imposing protectionist tariffs and quantitative restrictions across the world on 2 April. Almost all countries of the world, ranging from Western imperialist powers like the European Union and Canada to imperialist China in the East, have announced prompt retaliatory measures. Even countries from Latin America like Mexico and African countries have protested against the unilateral Trumpian tariffs. Following China’s tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs, Trump had to yield before it, by hurriedly reaching a trade deal with China based on two rounds of trade talks. Revealingly, the self-declared Vishwaguru endowed with such rhetoric as ‘Make in India’ ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’, etc.,
has not yet said anything on Trump’s unilateral and bullying tariffs.
Now, as reported, in the proposed trade deal, while India is begging for full exemption from the additional 26% tariffs on labour-intensive sectors like textiles, gems and jewellery, leather goods, garments, plastics, chemicals, shrimp, oil seeds, grapes, and bananas, the US move is to extract duty concessions on high-tech softwares, industrial goods, automobiles in general and electric vehicles in particular, petrochemical products and a whole set of agricultural items such as wine, dairy, apples, tree nuts, and even genetically modified crops. And the deal is reportedly aimed at doubling Indo-US bilateral trade from $191billion in 2025 to $500 billion by 2030. And the new trade pact is expected to be announced by 8 July 2025.
However, according to independent observers, and based on Trump’s latest assertion to further “open up” India, the Modi regime, in tune with its track record, is in the process of rolling out red carpet for dumping US products on India. It is also surrendering to US imperialist diktats by ensuring more investor-friendly measures or “ease of doing business” even to Silicon valley tech giants like Meta and Google. The other outcomes of these measures will be heavy blows on India’s pharmaceutical industries and further crippling of its painstaking efforts in the field of “frontier technologies” such as digitisation and AI.
The first casualty of the impending US-imposed trade deal on India involving duty cuts on soybean, corn, apples, dairy, etc., will be the farming community. The pro-corporate think-tank Niti Aayog that replaced the Planning Commission, and in tune with the US interests, in its recent working paper titled ‘Promoting India-US agricultural trade under the new US trade regime’ has already given the green signal for tariff reduction on soybean oil imports from the US to reduce trade imbalance. Of course, the Soybean Processor Association of India (SOPA) has strongly condemned it as it would make domestic cultivation economically unviable. Lower import duty on US agricultural products like maize, oil seeds, grapes, dairy products, etc., and above all, on GM seeds and the consequent free entry of US agribusiness MNCs into the Indian market will sound the death-knell of Indian agriculture. It is reminiscent of the three draconian Farm Laws that the Modi regime enacted according to WTO diktats in September 2020 when COVID Pandemic was at its zenith.
More gruesome is the latest India-U.S. Civil Nuclear Agreement, which is indirectly linked with the bilateral trade agreement, since both strengthen the US-India partnership, the latter as the former’s lackey. The declared aim of India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement (123 Agreement) is to meet India’s growing energy needs, foster technological collaboration and strengthen strategic partnership between US and India across various sectors. To facilitate this heinous move, the Modi government has committed to amend both the Atomic Energy Act, allowing private-sector investment in India’s civil nuclear industry, and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, to free overseas nuclear power plant vendors from their responsibility in the event of a nuclear accident. Modi government’s 2025 budget proposals allowing foreign nuclear companies to construct small modular reactors coupled with World Bank’s (one of US’neocolonial arms) shocking decision to finance nuclear plants were all prelude to the Modi regime’s firm commitment to “the US-India Energy Security Partnership, including in oil, gas and civil nuclear energy.”
To be precise, the Modi regime’s ignominious surrender to Trumpism is inherent in its mentor RSS’ servile attitude towards US imperialism from the very beginning. At a time when Trump and his reckless policies are vehemently opposed by world people including even democratic sections in US, the Indian regime’s efforts to cling on to the apron strings of its imperialist master in gross disregard of the sustenance and livelihood of farmers, workers and broad masses of Indian people are condemnable. These issues with far-reaching consequences for the country are not even discussed in parliament which is reduced to the statute of a mere edifice, even as decisions are made in corporate board-rooms. Therefore, it is high time on the part of all concerned to come forward resolutely resisting the impending US-India trade pact, thereby compelling the regime to desist from it at the earliest.
P J James
General Secretary
CPI (ML) Red Star
New Delhi
01.07.2025
