Analysis: You’d think Christopher Luxon would be gloating having brought India to the negotiating table within months he became the prime minister. He is not. And that’s good news.
India and New Zealand officially launched negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) on Sunday, hours after Luxon touched down in Delhi for a five-day trailblazer tour of the South Asian giant.
The two leaders committed to having senior representatives take a crack at negotiations to get a deal “as soon as reasonably possible”.
“They [the Indian side] are not saying we might do a deal,” Luxon told reporters on Tuesday. “They're saying they want to get a deal done. And so, you know, I think that's extremely encouraging.”
This isn’t the first such rodeo for the two countries. The two sides were firing on all cylinders when trade talks fell through after 10 rounds of negotiations back in 2016.
Luxon and New Zealand Inc met Indian CxOs on Tuesday at ITC Maurya hotel in Delhi. The prime minister got ahead of himself, seemingly out of excitement, and foreshadowed the urgency the two sides are putting to getting a deal done this time.
“Let's drive this relationship forward, and I look forward to Prime Minister Modi signing that agreement in 60 days time. Thank you very much,” Luxon said in a remark that he later told journalists he said in jest.
“I'd just say I wouldn't take the 60 to 90 days literally, but what I think you're seeing there very clearly is that two prime ministers and two trade ministers are sending messages very strongly to our respective systems that we expect them to continue to move at pace,” he said.
He said the deal “will take as long as it takes”. “Our commitment is to do exactly what we said–do it by the end of the term. But if we can do it by the end of this year, fantastic,” he said.
A first round of discussion that was earlier planned for next month has been moved to next week, offering a sense of what to expect. Luxon was asked on Tuesday if this deal could be the quickest one with India. “Well, we're going to just…since we're sending deliberately a message into our respective systems, we don't want this thing slowed up unnecessarily… to be losing time.
“You can see the way that I operate. You can see the way Prime Minister Modi operates. We are wanting to do this differently, and that means we're not afraid to have the hard conversations we need to have.”
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