Trump cites BRICS, ‘tremendous’ trade deficit behind 25% tariff on India

New York/Washington: President Donald Trump on Wednesday referred to the BRICS grouping and the "tremendous" trade deficit with New Delhi for announcing the 25 per cent tariff and said the US is currently negotiating with India.

“Well, we're negotiating right now, and it's also BRICS. You know, they have BRICS, which is basically a group of countries that are anti-US, and India is a member of that... It's an attack on the dollar, and we're not going to let anybody attack the dollar,” Trump said in the White House.

Trump on Wednesday announced imposing a 25 per cent tariff on all goods coming from India starting August 1, plus an unspecified penalty for buying Russian crude oil and military equipment.

The surprise announcement came a day after Indian officials said that a US trade team would visit from August 25 to negotiate a trade deal.

“So it's partially BRICS, and it's partially, it's partially the trade situation, it's a deficit. We have a tremendous deficit. So as you know, Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi is a friend of mine, but they don't do very much business in terms of business with us," Trump said.

He was responding to a question about the additional penalty that would be imposed on India.

"They sell a lot to us, but we don't buy from them. You know why? Because the tariff is so high, they have one of the highest tariffs in the world. Now, they're willing to cut it very substantially. But we'll see what happens," he said.

"We're talking to India now, we'll see what happens. It doesn't matter too much whether we have a deal or whether we charge them a certain tariff, but you'll know at the end of this week,” Trump said, and referred to the August 1 deadline on tariffs.

"India was the highest, or just about the highest tariff nation in the world, and one of the highest - 100 points, 150 points, or percentages. So India was one of the highest in the world. They had one 175 per cent and higher than that. You know, another higher one is Canada….But India is one of the highest. We're going to see, we are negotiating with India right now,” Trump said.

Trump has said in the past that the BRICS group of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa wanted to try and take over the “dominance of the dollar”, and he threatened to impose 10 per cent tariffs on the group’s member nations if they did so.