Nine rounds of negotiation, endless promises, but ASEAN still dodges our core demands on unfair trade practices and market access. With Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal calling out the bloc as “China’s B-Team," India stands at a crossroads: fix the imbalance, or walk away. If the tenth round of review talks is as ineffective as the rest, India may pick the second option.

India signed its landmark Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which has ten members Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The pact was signed in 2009 with the promise of prosperity, not pain.

Yet, today, the statistics tell a story starkly at odds with those early hopes: while trade rose to $123 billion, India’s trade deficit with ASEAN exploded from a manageable $5 billion in 2010-11 to a jaw-dropping $45 billion in 2024-25. This deficit is now in the same league as India’s $46 billion trade surplus with the United States which is being aggressively targeted by Trump with tariffs. And then there is the chronic deficit of almost $100 billion India faces with China. Plus, this is not the only bad deal that India is coping with. It also has FTA’s with Japan and South Korea to fix. In a world rapidly hardening on trade, can India afford to play by old, one-sided rules? Obviously no, and recalibrating trade with ASEAN is right at the top on India’s list.

From the outset, the ASEAN FTA was a “gentleman’s agreement" negotiated by the UPA government with a spirit of free trade and global integration, but lacking the hard-nosed pragmatism a deal of this scale demanded. The negotiators at the time overlooked the fact that the agreement left out India’s strongest suit—services—giving away vital market access on goods, but........

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