Lutnick’s deal timeline collides with Operation Sindoor, Trump’s ‘ceasefire’ claim

There was reason to.

India had launched Operation Sindoor to hit terrorist assets in Pakistan on May 7 as a response to the killings in Pahalgam, which led to intense fighting between the two countries for four days. On May 10, shortly before the ceasefire announcement by India and Pakistan, Trump took to social media to “announce” a US-mediated ceasefire between the two. India has consistently maintained that the ceasefire was arrived at bilaterally on Pakistan’s request, ruling out mediation by any third country.

In the weeks since that May conflagration, Trump has regularly repeated his mediation claim, but India’s continued denials led to a visible strain in the relationship.

Going by Lutnick’s timeline, it was against this backdrop that the Americans were expecting Modi to call Trump to seal the trade deal. Also, at around the same time that Lutnick says the deal was ready, Russia accounted for 37% of India’s oil imports.

Later, however, the India-Russia energy trade emerged as a major thorn in the India-US relationship. In early August, Trump imposed additional 25 per cent penal tariffs over India’s continued purchases of Russian crude.

Lutnick claimed that by the time India agreed to signing the deal, it had “missed the train” by three weeks as the US had by then announced deals with a few countries like Vietnam and Indonesia. He said that the deal couldn’t then be concluded on the terms that India and the US had originally agreed to because Trump does deals like a “staircase”, with the first country to come to the table getting the lowest tariffs, with a gradual increase in tariffs in subsequent deals.

Facts show otherwise.

US tariffs on the UK were agreed at 10 per cent, the lowest among all countries, while Vietnam got 20 per cent reciprocal tariffs in its deal, which was the second to be announced by the US. However, several trade deals announced after the Vietnam deal saw Washington imposing lower tariffs on countries like South Korea, Japan and those in the European Union and the ASEAN region. US tariffs continue to be high on the BRICS countries, with the highest 50 per cent on India.

Trade experts said that US trade agreements with Vietnam and a few other countries were indeed concluded around July 2025, but India-US negotiations continued well beyond that period, with multiple official-level engagements on market access, tariffs, and regulatory issues taking place afterwards.

“If Washington had already decided in July that there would be ‘no deal’ simply because Prime Minister Modi did not make a personal call, there would have been little reason for both sides to continue negotiating for months thereafter. The claim reads less like a contemporaneous reason and more like a retrospective justification,” former trade officer and head of think tank GTRI, Ajay Srivastava said.

Srivastava said that reducing a complex, multi-sector trade negotiation to the absence of a leader-to-leader phone call misses the logic of how such agreements are actually concluded. Trade deals of this scale hinge on unresolved policy differences—on tariffs, agriculture, digital trade and regulatory autonomy—not on symbolic gestures. Lutnick’s remarks therefore confuse diplomatic optics with negotiating reality, and overlook the deeper structural reasons why an India–US deal has remained elusive, he said.

Amid some stress in the India-US relations in the wake of Operation Sindoor, India’s significant imports of Russian crude emerged as a major irritant in the bilateral relationship and trade pact negotiations. Notably, this issue had not been flagged publicly by Trump and senior officials in his administration before July. This suggests that Washington did not consider India’s energy imports from Russia as a deal-breaker when, according to Lutnick, the trade pact was close to being announced.

This is not the first time Lutnick has criticised India for not signing a trade deal with the US. In September, he had said that India will be back at the negotiating table in the next one or two months, “saying sorry” to try to sign the trade deal, as the US is the largest consumer in the world and because the “consumer is always right”.

In June last year, Lutnick said that India’s military purchases from Russia and its alignment with BRICS on reducing dependence on the US dollar had “rubbed the United States the wrong way”.

Speaking at the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) in Washington DC, Lutnick said, “There were certain things that the Indian government did that generally rubbed the United States the wrong way. For instance, they generally buy military gear from Russia. That’s a way to kind of get under the skin of America, if you go to buy your armaments from Russia. India is starting to move towards buying military equipment from the United States.”