‘We Must Retaliate’: Shashi Tharoor Criticises Trump’s 50% Tariff on Indian Goods
Shashi Tharoor has criticised Donald Trump’s move to impose a 50 per cent tariff on Indian imports, urging India to retaliate with similar duties on American goods.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor came down heavily on US President Donald Trump’s decision to levy an additional 25 per cent duty on Indian products, stating that no nation can intimidate India in this manner.
“This will surely have an effect, as we have a trade relationship worth 90 billion dollars with them. If everything becomes 50 per cent more costly, buyers will wonder why they should purchase Indian items,” Tharoor stated.
He also called on the Indian government to respond strongly by imposing tariffs on American products.
“If they are doing this, we must also impose a 50 per cent duty on US exports,” he asserted.
“It’s not acceptable for any country to threaten us like this,” he added.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order introducing an additional 25 per cent duty on Indian imports over the continuation of crude oil purchases from Russia.
With this order, the total tariff now stands at 50 per cent.
Shortly afterward, Tharoor commented that Trump’s move would make “our goods unaffordable for a large number of customers in the US.”
He also noted that, although China is importing a range of goods—including significantly more Russian oil than India—it has been granted a “90-day exemption” from the US tariff policy.
“Uranium, palladium—several things are being imported by the US from Russia. Sadly, there seems to be a double standard at play. The Chinese have been given a 90-day relaxation, even though they’re importing far more Russian oil than us,” Tharoor said.
“This clearly hasn’t been a friendly gesture from a country we believed had good intentions toward us, from an administration we thought was positively inclined,” he told reporters.
Indicating that the tariffs may reflect a strain in India-US relations, the Congress MP suggested there could now be increasing pressure within India to impose reciprocal duties on US exports.
“Clearly, we must respond accordingly, and we must take lessons from this incident. There will almost certainly be some internal demand within India now to impose matching retaliatory tariffs on US goods. So I believe we will need to start exploring alternative trade partnerships more seriously under these conditions,” Tharoor added.
