A remark by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick blaming the lack of a personal phone call from PM Narendra Modi for the stalled India–US trade deal does not stand up to scrutiny and diverts attention from substantive policy differences, the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI) said in a report released on Friday.In an interview on the All-In Podcast on January 8, Lutnick said the long-pending trade agreement failed to materialise because Prime Minister Modi did not personally call then US President Donald Trump to close the negotiations. According to Lutnick, by the time Modi agreed to make the call, the US had already moved on to concluding trade deals with Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, leaving India out of that sequence.
However, GTRI noted that while the US did conclude agreements with those countries around July 2025, India–US trade negotiations continued well beyond that period. The report pointed out that multiple official-level engagements on market access, tariffs and regulatory issues took place after those deals were signed, undermining the claim that Washington had already decided there would be “no deal” with India at that stage.“If the absence of a leader-level phone call had decisively ended the negotiations in mid-2025, there would have been little reason for both sides to continue talks for months thereafter,” the report said, calling Lutnick’s explanation more of a retrospective justification than a contemporaneous reason.GTRI also said framing the impasse as a failure of personal diplomacy misunderstands how large trade agreements are concluded. Such deals hinge on convergence over policy issues including tariffs, agriculture, digital trade and regulatory autonomy, rather than symbolic gestures between leaders, it noted.The report concluded that the prolonged delay in the India–US trade deal reflects unresolved structural and policy disagreements rather than a missed phone call, warning that oversimplifying the issue risks trivialising one of the most significant trade relationships in the global economy.
