Dear Readers,

A comment that India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal made during the Berlin Global Dialogue last week has gone viral. In his comment, Goyal made it abundantly clear that India does not strike trade deals under duress.

“We don’t do deals in a hurry and we don’t do deals with deadlines or with a gun on our head,” he had said, and this was the part that caught everyone’s attention.

However, what was equally noteworthy was the reason he gave for India’s approach : “We’d like to really look at the long term. We recognise that 20-25 years from now we’ll be a $30 trillion economy. And accordingly we’ll negotiate based on the future. A trade deal is in the long term and we have to recognise the future and get the best deal.”

The central point here is that Indi

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