Manoranjana Gupta
When Washington tried to strong-arm New Delhi with punitive tariffs, India did not bend. Instead, it doubled down on self-reliance, diversified its markets beyond the United States, and emerged as a far larger export power than its critics had imagined. Today, the Ministry of Commerce’s export tables, the Ministry of Finance’s fiscal surveys, and global assessments from consultancies and think tanks converge on a single story: the fracture of global trade is not India’s loss, but India’s opportunity.
In fact, I had argued in my own Eurasia Review column a few months ago that America’s attempt to squeeze India with tariffs would end up creating the opposite effect. By trying to bully New Delhi, Washington would push India toward a harder embrace of self-reliance. That defiance, I wrote then, would not be a setback but a springboard: an opportunity for India to diversify markets, scale exports, and claim a firmer place in the world’s trading system. Today, the data pouring in from the Commerce and Finance Ministries bears that prediction out.
The rupture in trade flows that defines this decade did not begin in Delhi or Hanoi, but in Washington. As the United States widened its tariff arsenal — first against China, and then against India’s steel, aluminium, and technology services — it expected compliance. Instead, the Modi government drew a line. There would be no capitulation. The Ministry of Commerce’s 2024 report showed how India responded: by expanding bilateral exports with ASEAN, Africa, the Gulf, and Europe. Far from wilting, India’s export base reached an unprecedented $820 billion in goods and services in FY 2024–25, according to the Ministry of Finance. This was muscular diversification, not fragile growth. McKinsey, PwC, and NITI Aayog now note that India’s breadth of export partners has expanded faster than any other G20 nation.
When I spoke recently with a senior official in the Ministry of Finance, he underlined that the $820 billion export figure was not just a number on paper. It represented new shipping lanes to Africa, contracts inked in Gulf ports, and hundreds of smaller exporters filing returns for the first time. The Commerce Ministry’s own resources show that between 2019 and 2025, the number of active exporters has risen by nearly 40 percent — a statistic rarely highlighted in headlines.
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