Jaishankar Turns 'Plateau' Into 'Landing Point' on US Trade

 

By TechPulse USA Bureau

NEW DELHI — 14 October 2026. A week ago, India’s finance minister said the trade talks with Washington had hit a plateau. On Tuesday evening, her cabinet colleague stood on a stage in New Delhi and quietly replaced that word. The deal, said External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, is heading towards a “landing point”.

That is quite a shift in eight days. It is also, for now, nothing more than a shift in language. No date was given. No terms were disclosed. No text was produced. A landing point is not a landing, and anyone reporting this as a done deal is getting ahead of both governments. But language matters in trade talks, and Jaishankar is not a minister given to loose metaphors. When he swaps “plateau” for “landing point”, it is worth asking what he knows that the rest of us do not.

The setting was the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi, where Jaishankar was in conversation with John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief. The question was the obvious one: where do the India–US trade negotiations stand? The answer was measured, a little teasing, and — by the standards of this long, grinding negotiation — strikingly upbeat.

What Jaishankar actually said

First, the coyness. Asked about the state of play, Jaishankar said: “I wouldn’t be comfortable spilling the beans in public.” The line got its laugh, but it was also a signal: whatever the remaining sticking points are, they are specific enough that he would not name them on a stage.

Then came the substance. He said the trade ministers, the US Trade Representative and India’s commerce and industry minister were working on the outstanding issues: “They’re ironing it out.” And then the line that made headlines: “My sense is that this is an issue which is heading towards a landing point.”

He went further in a separate exchange at the same forum, saying: “It’s heading in the right direction. We’re very encouraged by it.” He added that his trade minister had been saying in public that the two sides were “kind of almost there” and just needed to “figure this out”.

There was a second, quieter message tucked inside the optimism. Jaishankar argued that any deal is only half bilateral: the other half is how India fares against its rivals. If Vietnam or China lands a better American offer, India’s deal is worse, whatever its own text says. As he put it, part of the negotiation is “how you fare vis-a-vis competitive economies” — and that part is “not entirely clear because not everybody has worked out a deal”.

He also widened the lens. The United States, he said, had changed the manner and basis on which it engages with the world, and every country had to recalculate its relationship with Washington. India’s, he stressed, rests on a strategic partnership rather than a formal alliance: “a strategic partnership is a partnership; it’s not an alliance”. The convergences built up over twenty-odd years, he argued, had not fundamentally changed. And he linked the whole tariff fight to something bigger — an America determined to reindustrialise and to reset the terms of access to its economy.

What he did not do is just as important. He gave no date. He named no concession on either side. He produced no text. “Landing point” is his characterisation, not an announcement.

From “plateau” to “landing point” in eight days

To feel the size of this shift, rewind. Earlier this month, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the talks had reached a “plateau”, with little room left for manoeuvre. Further give and take, she suggested, would be very, very difficult for both sides. She also blamed Washington’s habit of using tariffs as a weapon for the stall.

Days earlier, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had said a deal was “not imminent” — the line we covered in our report on Jabil’s India bet. Greer has since described the talks as in their “short strokes”, the final stretch, and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump had a “very constructive call” and may speak again soon to assess progress. But his most recent bottom line remains that nothing is imminent.

Then, on Wednesday, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal added his own gloss at the same Bloomberg forum, calling India–US ties “very good”: “Of course, it is already very good. I don’t see any problem as we speak also.” He said the relationship went far beyond trade — defence, technology, critical minerals, people-to-people ties — and would only improve regardless of changes in political thinking in either country.

So here is the scoreboard of metaphors: plateau, not imminent, short strokes, very good, landing point. Three ministers, two governments, and a spread of moods wide enough to drive a container ship through. The generous reading is that each is talking to a different audience: Sitharaman to domestic industry, Greer to a Washington that hates being bounced, Jaishankar to a room full of global investors. The sceptical reading is that somebody is managing expectations. Both readings can be true at once.

The tariff stack, layer by layer

None of this makes sense without the tariff arithmetic, and the arithmetic is a mess. There is no single “current rate” on Indian goods entering America. There are layers, from different legal bases, stacked on top of each other. Anyone quoting one number without the layers is misleading you.

Layer one: 50%. In August 2025, after an earlier round of talks collapsed, Indian goods faced a combined 50% tariff — a 25% baseline plus a 25% penalty imposed over India’s purchases of Russian oil, according to Reuters. That was the punitive peak, and the number that set this whole saga running.

Layer two: 18%. In February, the two sides agreed a framework for the deal that would have brought the tariff on most Indian goods down to 18% from 50%, Reuters reported. An interim deal was agreed on 2 February, on that basis. Note the conditional: would have. What happened next scrambled it.

Layer three: 10%. On 20 February, the US Supreme Court struck down the sweeping global tariffs imposed under emergency powers, ruling the president had exceeded his authority. In response, President Trump imposed a temporary 10% tariff on imports, citing authority under the 1974 Trade Act. That left the status of trade deals with countries including India unclear — the 18% framework was negotiated against a tariff architecture that no longer exists in its old form.

Layer four: up to 100%. On 18 September, President Trump signed into law the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which gives him authority to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the five largest importers of Russian oil and gas. The bill passed the Senate 86–11 and the House 262–159. Crucially, it does not automatically impose a 100% tariff on India or anyone else — it creates the authority, not the levy. As we reported at the time, no 100% tariff has actually been slapped on India. India is the second-largest buyer of Russian crude after China, so the threat is real, but it is a loaded weapon, not a fired one.

Stack those layers and you get the negotiators’ headache: a framework built for 18%, a court ruling that rewrote the legal ground beneath it, a 10% stopgap, and a statute that could blow the whole thing up to 100% if the Russian-oil question goes wrong. We checked the PTI dispatch against the BusinessLine and BusinessToday accounts of the same exchange, and against the Reuters explainer of 6 October, before writing a word of this — and the tariff picture is genuinely this tangled. For the full background, see our earlier explainer on the tariff fight.

What is still in the way

Jaishankar’s optimism has to survive contact with at least three obstacles that nobody has claimed to have cleared.

First, Washington has yet to complete a Section 301 trade investigation into several countries over alleged excess industrial capacity — the question of whether overproduction is hurting American industries. Until that probe is done, Reuters notes, it is hard to say what final tariff Indian goods will attract. You cannot close a deal when one of its biggest variables is still being investigated.

Second, the Russian-oil question. India’s purchases have not been significantly reduced, according to Reuters, and that is the tripwire for the up-to-100% authority described above. Every tariff conversation with Washington now runs through Moscow’s oil terminals, whether New Delhi likes it or not.

Third, the competitive-economies problem Jaishankar himself flagged. India is not just negotiating against America; it is negotiating against every other country that has cut, or is cutting, its own deal. Until the full board is visible, New Delhi cannot know whether its landing point is a good one or a bad one.

And behind all of it sits a year of bruised feelings: the US military attack on a ship off Oman that killed three Indian seafarers, and India’s rejection of President Trump’s repeated claim to have brokered a ceasefire with Pakistan. Trade talks do not happen in a vacuum, and this vacuum has been unusually dusty.

Why Washington’s silence matters

Here is the part that should temper every headline, including this one: there is no fresh US-side quote to match Jaishankar’s. The most recent American word remains Greer’s “not imminent”, softened only by his “short strokes” remark. Goyal says ties are “very good”. Jaishankar says “landing point”. But trade deals are announced in pairs. Until the USTR or the White House uses language in the same register, this is one side’s weather report.

That is not a criticism of Jaishankar. Ministers do not float words like “landing point” at a Bloomberg forum by accident, in front of the world’s investors, unless they believe something has moved. But belief is not confirmation, and the gap between “not imminent” and “landing point” is exactly the gap in which deals have died before.

Our reading: believe the direction, not the destination

So where does that leave us? Our judgment is this: the direction of travel is real, and the destination is still unproven. Jaishankar has spent a career choosing his words like a man spending his own money, and “landing point” is a deliberate upgrade from “plateau”. Combined with Greer’s “short strokes”, Goyal’s breezy confidence, and a possible new Modi–Trump call, the momentum is the best it has been since the talks stalled.

But momentum is not a signature. The tariff whiplash of the past year — 50% to a promised 18% to a court ruling to a 10% stopgap to a statute threatening 100% — is a shoddy way to run the world’s biggest trade relationship, and it has left exporters pricing contracts off quicksand. A landing point is not a landing: planes circle, weather closes in, and runways get reassigned. The honest summary is that a deal is closer than it looked a week ago, and done when Washington says so. We will believe the landing when both capitals announce it on the same day.

What to watch next

Four things will tell us whether Jaishankar’s landing point is real. First, whether Greer or the White House echoes the language — one matching American sentence changes everything. Second, whether the promised Modi–Trump call happens, and what either side says about it afterwards. Third, whether the Section 301 investigation moves towards completion, removing the biggest unknown in the tariff maths. And fourth, whether anything shifts on Russian-oil purchases, the tripwire wired to the whole negotiation.

For Indian exporters, American importers and anyone whose business runs through the Vallarpadam terminal in Kochi, the stakes are immediate: the difference between an 18% framework and a 100% threat is the difference between a viable order book and a dead one. For everyone else, this is the story of the two biggest democracies trying to write the rules of the next decade’s trade — in public, in metaphors, one forum at a time.

File photo: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar meets US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in New Delhi, July 2021. Photo: US Department of State / Ron Przysucha, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo: The Vallarpadam International Container Transshipment Terminal in Kochi, Kerala — India’s first and largest single-operator container terminal, and a barometer of the export trade hanging on these talks. Photo: BgbwikiV4, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources: PTI via ThePrint; Hindu BusinessLine; Reuters explainer via ThePrint (6 October 2026); CNBC TV18; BusinessToday; Scroll. Quotes are from the PTI dispatch and the BusinessLine and BusinessToday accounts of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum exchange.

TechPulse USA Bureau covers US tech, trade and AI policy from New Delhi and Washington. Tips and corrections: reach us through the blog’s contact page.

India–US trade deal FAQ

What did Jaishankar actually say? That the India–US trade talks are "heading towards a landing point", with trade ministers "ironing it out" — a deliberate upgrade from "plateau", but not an announcement. No date, terms or text were given.

What tariff does India actually face right now? There is no single rate — the post lays out the layers: the 50% peak, the 18% framework, the 10% stopgap, and the up-to-100% authority. As we reported, no 100% tariff has actually been slapped on India.

What is still blocking a deal? Three obstacles: the unfinished Section 301 investigation, the Russian-oil tripwire, and the competitive-economies problem — India cannot judge its deal until rivals' deals are visible.

Why does Washington's silence matter? Trade deals are announced in pairs. Until the USTR or the White House matches Jaishankar's language, this remains one side's weather report.

How does this affect Indian exporters? The gap between an 18% framework and a 100% threat is the gap between a viable order book and a dead one — which is why manufacturers are hedging, as in Jabil's India bet. For the wider fight, see our explainer on tariffs, visas and deportations.