After the tariff wars and the new deals, what is the smart trade strategy from here?

India’s fastest growth came when the world was open and India was only partly so. Between 1991 and 2011, Indian firms found markets abroad, foreign capital and technology came in, and customers on the far side of the planet bought Indian software. Through all of it, India kept its tariffs high and added a thicket of rules behind them, and the world largely let this pass, treating it as an indulgence granted to a poor country thought to be on its way to becoming a full member of the trading system. That indulgence has ended. The countries India sells to now expect access to run both ways, and they will make trouble when it does not.

That leaves India a choice: pull back, or open further. The best argument for pulling back rests on India’s own record. Indian exports grew no faster to the countries India signed trade agreements with than to the countries it did not, so on the face of it, opening bought India nothing. Either negotiators struck those deals badly, or Indian firms could not use them.

Both explanations lead back to the same place. A country that enters negotiations charging much higher tariffs than the other side pays more for a deal to cut them than the other side does: its own producers meet real new competition, while its exporters gain little, since the other country’s barriers were low to begin with. India’s agreements duly felt one-sided, and that feeling became the case for signing no more. Other developing countries have used trade agreements the other way round, binding themselves to reforms they wanted anyway and could not otherwise carry politically. India has negotiated to avoid that commitment. It has promised the world a ceiling far above the duties it actually charges, which leaves Delhi free to raise them whenever it likes. A firm spending years and crores on a factory here must allow for the chance that the duty on its imported parts rises once the money is sunk.

That record is why “what did we win in the deal?” is the wrong question. An agreement is worth what it removes at home. The gains from trade are the things Indians get to buy and the higher productivity Indian firms gain through competition. Tariffs on machinery and components tax every Indian exporter who needs those inputs, and a tariff another country drops is only a bonus on top.

The barriers that matter now are mostly not tariffs at all. They are rules about standards, testing, and certification that decide whether a foreign supplier can sell in a country at all. Agreements to harmonise standards are therefore worth more than reductions in duty.

Forty years behind tariff walls already showed that barriers to trade do not build a competitive industry. If India still wears the label “tariff king,” that means Delhi has forgotten the lesson, or never learned it. Indian tariffs and duties hurt Indian firms and Indian people. Delhi wrote those barriers, and Delhi can undo them, without waiting for anyone else to move first.