Lutnick had claimed that the trade deal failed to materialise because Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not personally place a call to US President Donald Trump. Speaking on the ‘All-In Podcast’ with American venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya on Thursday (local time), the US commerce secretary said negotiations were largely complete and that the final step required direct engagement between the two leaders.
As India-US trade talks continue to face delays, GTRI said Lutnick’s remarks shift attention away from substantive issues and towards symbolism. The explanation raises more questions than it answers about how complex trade negotiations actually break down, the think tank said.
Lutnick also claimed that although Prime Minister Modi later agreed to make the call, it came “too late”, as Washington had already moved on to finalising trade agreements with other countries. The US concluded trade deals with Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines around July 2025.
However, GTRI noted that India-US negotiations continued well beyond that period, with multiple rounds of official-level discussions on market access, tariffs and regulatory issues taking place afterward.
“If Washington had already decided in July that there would be “no deal” simply because Prime Minister Modi did not make a personal call, there would have been little reason for both sides to continue negotiating for months thereafter. The claim reads less like a contemporaneous reason and more like a retrospective justification,” GTRI supplemented.Reducing a complex, multi-sector trade negotiation to the absence of a leader-to-leader phone call ignores how such agreements are actually concluded, the think tank argued. Trade deals of this scale hinge on unresolved policy differences—covering tariffs, agriculture, digital trade and regulatory autonomy—not symbolic gestures.
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“Lutnick’s remarks therefore confuse diplomatic optics with negotiating reality, and overlook the deeper structural reasons why an India-US deal has remained elusive,” GTRI said.
The trade impasse reflects hard policy choices on both sides rather than missed phone calls, it concluded.
“Framing the delay as a matter of personal diplomacy may offer a convenient narrative, but it obscures the substantive disagreements that both sides have yet to resolve–and risks trivialising one of the most consequential trade relationships in the global economy,” the GTRI report concludes.
The backdrop to the stalled talks is a tougher US trade stance under the Trump administration, which has imposed tariffs on several major exporters, including India and China. Goods from India entering the United States have faced tariffs of up to 50 per cent since August 2025. (With inputs from ANI)