Washington: US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Washington and New Delhi are “pretty close” to finalising a trade deal, striking an optimistic note on negotiations that have moved through several rounds of ministerial-level engagement this year.
“They want to make a deal. We’re going to make a deal. Pretty close, yeah,” Trump told reporters at the Oval Office, where he was speaking alongside Vice President JD Vance. “It’s going to be a much different kind of deal than we’ve done,” he added, without elaborating on what would set the pact apart from earlier agreements.
The remarks came even as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in India. Rubio met External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in Mumbai, where the two leaders discussed cooperation across trade, energy, technology, defence and people-to-people ties — a signal that both capitals are underlining the breadth of the relationship even as the trade talks approach what Trump describes as the finish line.
India and the United States had announced the framework for the first phase of the bilateral trade agreement (BTA) in February 2026, setting the architecture within which the current round of negotiations is taking place. Since then, officials on both sides have been working to translate that framework into a concrete first-phase pact.
The pace of engagement has been brisk. Earlier this month, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal met US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Milwaukee and Washington, holding detailed discussions as part of the ongoing trade talks — meetings that evidently fed into the upbeat assessment Trump offered on Tuesday.
The Rubio-Jaishankar conversation in Mumbai covered the full waterfront of the bilateral agenda — trade, energy, technology, defence and people-to-people ties — underlining that the two sides are treating the trade negotiation as one strand of a much wider strategic partnership rather than an isolated commercial bargain.
Trump’s “pretty close” formulation stops short of committing to a timeline, and his description of the agreement as “a much different kind of deal than we’ve done” leaves the contours of the pact open to interpretation. For now, the message from the Oval Office is one of confidence: a deal is coming, and it is close.
With the BTA framework already announced in February and ministerial-level engagement continuing on both sides, the stage is set for what both capitals evidently hope will be a landmark first phase. Whether “pretty close” translates into ink on paper in the coming weeks is the question that will now dominate the brief of every trade watcher in both countries.
