Bhubaneswar: Not for the first time, Donald Trump has fired a warning at India.
The former US president, who is preparing to contest the 2024 elections, raised the issue of high taxes in India on certain American products and threatened to slap reciprocal taxes on New Delhi if he wins a second term, reported PTI.
During his first term as US president from 2016 to 2020, Trump had described India as ‘tariff king’. He even terminated India’s preferential market access — Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) — to the US in May 2019, alleging that India have not given the US “equitable and reasonable access to its markets.”
Despite facing several court cases and indictments, Trump is leading the Republican presidential primaries with over half of the GOP votes according to major national polls.
“The other thing I want to have is a matching tax where, if India charges us — India is very big with tariffs. I mean, I saw it with Harley-Davidson. I was saying, how do you do in a place like India? Oh, no good sir. Why? They have 100 per cent and 150 per cent and 200 per cent tariffs,” the 77-year-old former President said in an interview with Fox Business News.
“So, I said, so they can sell their Indian motorbike. They actually make a bike, an Indian motorbike. They can sell that into our country with no tax, no tariff, but when you make a Harley, when you send it over there — because they were doing no business. I said, how come you don’t do business with India? The tariff is so high that nobody wants it. But what they want us to do is, they want us to go over and build a plant, and then you have no tariff,” Trump said.
“They said, well, that’s not good. That’s not our deal, okay? That’s not our deal. And I came down very hard on them. But India is very big. Brazil is very big on tariffs, I mean, very, very big. We had a couple of people, like the senator from a place called Pennsylvania that I love. But this guy was just horrendous. I said, let me ask you a question. If India is charging us 200 per cent, and we’re charging them nothing for products, can we charge them 100 per cent? No, sir, that’s not free trade. Can we charge them 50 per cent? No, sir. Twenty-five, 10, anything? No. I said, what the hell is wrong? There’s something wrong. You know what I’m talking about,” he said.
“If India is charging us too, so what I want to have is a — call it retribution. You could call it whatever you want. If they are charging us, we charge them,” Trump made it clear.
That won’t be music to the ears of Indian business houses.
