Trading Lines

India’s trade engagement with America has long been shaped by asymmetry. The United States, while remaining India’s largest export destination, has increasingly become its most erratic negotiating partner. Under Donald Trump, trade has been reduced to a crude calculus of deficits and punishments. Tariffs have been wielded as instruments of political theatre to be imposed and withdrawn at whim.

It is amid this backdrop that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat, in his latest speech, cautioned again that India’s trade agreements must be concluded on its own terms and conditions and not in thrall to tariff threats.

Bhagwat’s warning, not his first, comes after both countries issued a joint statement announcing they had reached a framework for an Interim Agreement, and would continue working together towards a more comprehensive Bilateral Trade Agreement. The agreement comes after a season of sustained hostility marked by President Trump’s transactional bullying.

Indian policymakers routinely invoke ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘Atmanirbharta’ even as they pursue market access abroad. Bhagwat’s remarks sharpen this contradiction. By insisting that India will not sign deals under pressure, he implicitly rejects the logic that coercion can be normalised as negotiation.

Nor is the source of the message incidental. The RSS is not a trade negotiator, but it remains the ideological axis of India’s ruling ecosystem. When its chief speaks in front of industrialists, celebrities and political heavyweights, his words function as a constraint as much as a commentary. Foreign capitals would be mistaken to treat them as decorative nationalism.

Bhagwat’s invocation of India as a vishwaguru rather than an intimidating superpower was more than rhetorical flourish. It was a contrast drawn deliberately against the strident American model of economic statecraft perfected under Trump, which is indifferent to institutional norms. Tariffs, once dismissed by economists as self-harm, have been turned by the US President into instruments of domestic posturing while allies have been treated little better than adversaries. India, Bhagwat suggested, has no intention of mimicking such behaviour or submitting to it.

Modern trade negotiations are rarely conducted among equals. Power differentials are real, and leverage is always exercised. To pretend otherwise is to moralise a process that is fundamentally political. Yet Bhagwat’s formulation leaves little room for concessions that can be portrayed as externally imposed, however economically rational they may be.

His insistence that the RSS does not hold the remote control of the Bharatiya Janata Party serves a dual purpose. Formally, it preserves the fiction of organisational separation. Substantively, it signals that certain ideological red lines on sovereignty, coercion and national dignity exist beyond which the government’s room for manoeuvre shrinks.

The real test lies ahead. If the final Bilateral Trade Agreement reflects mutual accommodation rather than asymmetric pressure, it will vindicate India’s claim to strategic autonomy. If not, the interim deal may stand as the outer limit of what Trump-era trade diplomacy can extract from a country increasingly determined to draw its own trading lines.