The long-negotiated India-US trade deal is "90-per-cent-plus" complete, says a senior American diplomat to an Indian news agency this week, and “what's left will be ‘unleashing another level' of relations between the two countries that were never really brought to fruition by decades of summitry.” It's a pretty bold line, and it's also, if you've been following this story since early last year, a line that's been stated before, in slightly different terms, by slightly different people, at slightly different points in a negotiation that's been in the air now for at least another two years' worth of travel schedules by two Indian trade ministers, one fast descent towards tariff war, and at least three rounds of “final” details.

This doesn't negate the optimism of the week. It does not mean it should be read on its own as a headline, but in conjunction with a larger record.

Begin with the current situation. Washington and New Delhi announced a plan to lower Washington's duty on Indian goods to 18 percent from an excise rate of 50 percent, which consisted of a reciprocal tariff plus a punitive 25 percent surcharge based on India's continued purchases of Russian crude, in February this year, and India's agreement to eventually purchase more than $500 billion worth of American energy, technology and farm products.

This was the breakthrough. So, since then, it has been the more difficult and less glamorous task of turning a headline number into legal text rules of origin, tariff-rate quotas for farm products, market access for dairy products and genetically modified crops that India has been loath to open to its trading partners, and the calibration of a "preferential" tariff gap that puts Indian exporters ahead of Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia in the American market, not just at parity.

That is the reason that Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal has been exceptionally sharp on. “In substance, the deal is done and dusted,” he said in New Delhi on Thursday, “but it's going to be signed when Washington gets the competitive edge over India's rivals for American shelf space.” It's a negotiating stance masquerading as a status update and it's as much a reflection of where the real disagreement is as it is on which government's exporters are getting the better deal into the same American stores, on garments, shrimp, footwear and electronics.

The numbers tell the story of why both teams are in a battle for that extra margin. India's exports to the United States rose to nearly 104 billion dollars in 2025, while U.S. exports to India climbed to 46 billion dollars for a combined total of almost 149 billion dollars in goods traded between the two nations, with India recording a surplus of more than 30 billion dollars that Washington has been warning about as a political headache.

In the first four months of the current fiscal year, Indian exports to the U.S. have increased 3 percent to $34.5 billion and U.S. imports from India have surged more than 22 percent to about $22 billion, narrowing in just exactly the right direction, as energy, defence equipment and aircraft purchases have driven the increase, not tariff reductions, and not Washington's negotiators. The biggest out-of-sea tariff gaps are by far the electrical machinery and telecom equipment, generic pharmaceuticals, polished diamonds and gems, and industrial machinery and cotton textiles, where a tariff advantage over the competition in Southeast Asia would directly affect order books and not just sentiment.

Then there's the bigger calendar that's more rarely in the news on this deal. Goyal is headed to Wisconsin next week for the G20 trade ministerial where he will be meeting directly with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, which both capitals are considering as the likely place to wrap up what may be unfinished business. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be in India in October.

The three-way talks among foreign ministers from the four nations is an unusually tight schedule for the ministers in their respective positions and is "unprecedented," according to American government officials. But by the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected on his way to Florida in December for the G20 leaders' meeting, both governments would no longer be in a hurry to dispense with another ‘very close' word for word explanation.

The timing is not incidental, but is the setting of the whole picture. Brussels has just submitted its own India trade deal for the European Council's approval, Ottawa and New Delhi are accelerating after the ministerial meeting held in Mumbai last week and the discussions with Mexico have come to the end of their terms of reference, while one involving the Gulf Cooperation Council begins in October.

India, in effect, isn't talking to Washington alone it has been working on building a portfolio of trade deals with a firm hand and has been honest that a deal with Israel will come when it comes, and that it didn't join the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership because it didn't want to lessen its negotiating leverage. In that case, the hesitation to sign the American deal without any solid tariff buffer against Hanoi and Dhaka is not so much a laggard as it has been with other deals on which India has negotiated this year.