Washington and New Delhi are as “close as you can be without having executed the agreement” to completing a trade deal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Mumbai on Tuesday ahead of talks with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
“I think there’s a small number of items left to wrap up, so I think that will happen shortly,” Rubio said.
The two top diplomats discussed regional developments and ways to strengthen bilateral ties in trade, energy, technology and defense. Previous trade negotiations had stalled over India’s resistance to opening politically sensitive agricultural sectors, including poultry, dairy, rice and wheat, to U.S. competition, as well as its reliance on Russian oil imports, which had exposed New Delhi to the threat of tariffs of up to 100 percent until President Donald Trump waived the impending sanctions on Friday.
The Trump administration had already imposed tariffs totaling up to 50 percent on most Indian goods in August 2025, including a penalty for India’s purchases of discounted Russian oil. While a framework reached in February lowered the rate to 18 percent, New Delhi has continued to push for terms that will give its exporters a competitive edge over regional rivals such as Vietnam, China and Bangladesh.
Experts say uncertainty over the legal basis for Trump’s tariffs also delayed a final agreement after a bevy of lawsuits—which culminated in the Supreme Court’s February repudiation of the president’s authority—undermined the reciprocal duties forming the basis of the deal.
“The February framework had offered to reduce India’s reciprocal tariff… in return for substantial Indian concessions,” Ajay Srivastava, founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative, said in a note earlier this month. “Once that tariff regime was struck down, the value of the U.S. offer became unclear.”
The limits of the president’s tariff-setting powers came under renewed scrutiny on Tuesday when a food importer sued to block new tariffs on Canadian imports, arguing that they represent another instance of executive overreach already rejected by the courts. Trump had levied 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods over the summer in response to what he said was the country’s discriminatory treatment of U.S.-made cars, alcohol and dairy goods and retaliation against previous U.S. levies.
Energy, meanwhile, remained a focus of Washington’s engagement with New Delhi.
Rubio, who is on a six-day diplomatic tour of Uzbekistan and India, told reporters in the United States before his departure on Saturday that India had diversified its energy sources but still purchased substantial volumes of Russian oil because “it’s hard to pivot from one day to the next.”
Returning to the issue on Tuesday, Rubio said he would encourage Reliance Industries to refine more Venezuelan crude. He is scheduled to visit the Jamnagar Refinery in Gujarat, which processes roughly 1.4 million barrels of crude oil per day and can handle the South American nation’s ultra-heavy crude, to discuss producing oil inside Venezuela with the company’s leadership.
“They have done so in the past, and I think as more and more of Venezuelan oil comes online, that is something they can do,” he told reporters. “We are going to go see what the holdup is and what opportunities exist.”