US President Donald Trump said there would be no change in the United States’ trade stance toward India, asserting that the current tariff arrangement benefits Washington.
Stressing that the “India deal is on,” Trump described his relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “fantastic” and repeated his claims on trade with India.
“Nothing changes. They’ll be paying tariffs and we will not be paying tariffs… PM Modi is a great man. He was much smarter than the people he was against in terms of the US… He was ripping us off. So we made a deal with India… We are not paying tariffs to them and they are. We did a little flip,” Trump said.
Trump also addressed bilateral ties.
“My relationship with India is fantastic, and we are doing trade with India. India pulled out of Russia. India was getting its oil from Russia, and they pulled way back on my request because we want to settle a horrible war where 25,000 people are dying every month,”, he said.
“My relationship with PM Modi is great. I also stopped the war between India and Pakistan… Yesterday, the Prime Minister of Pakistan said that President Trump saved 35 million lives by getting them to stop. I did it largely with tariffs. I said, ‘You want to fight, that is fine, but you are not going to do business with the United States, and you are going to pay a 200% tariff, each country.’ They called up, and they said, we have made peace.”
India had not officially responded as of 2 am IST.
Congress’ response on US tariff ruling
Opposition leaders, including senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, weighed in on the developments.
“I wrote in my Sunday column on February 15, 2026 that if the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s imposition of tariffs, the result will be that the US and India will revert to the status quo ante (before April 2, 2025). Meanwhile, the US has extracted several concessions from India without conceding any. What will happen to those concessions?
The joint statement announced Zero tariff on many goods that the US will export to India; that India intends to import USD 500 billion worth of goods from the US; that India will not buy Russian oil; that India will address the non-tariff barriers to US goods, and so on. What will happen to those promises?”
An Indian team is now in the US to finalise the text of the Framework Agreement. What will the team do now?
The government must explain the impact of the judgement on the ‘deal’ that was announced on February 6 between the US and India” Chidambaram concluded.