External affairs minister S. Jaishankar on Tuesday publicly contested US President Donald Trump’s repeated claim of having leveraged trade to get India and Pakistan to halt their conflict in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor in early May.
“I was in the room” when American Vice-President J.D. Vance spoke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 9, Jaishankar said while issuing what was the Indian political leadership’s first rebuttal of Trump’s claim.
Responding to a question on whether Trump’s repeated assertions had affected the ongoing negotiations for a bilateral trade agreement between India and the US, Jaishankar’s response was a categorical “no”.
The external affairs minister was fielding questions at a fireside chat organised by the Newsweek magazine in New York ahead of his trip to Washington for the Quad before heading to Brazil for the Brics Summit.
While the external affairs ministry has time and again publicly maintained that there was no room for any mediation between India and Pakistan — citing a time-tested policy — and that trade was not discussed with the US during calls from Washington to de-escalate, this is the first time anyone in the political leadership has countered Trump on a claim he has made over a dozen times.
“For many years… it’s been a national consensus that our dealings with Pakistan are bilateral. And, in this particular case, I can tell you that I was in the room when Vice-President Vance spoke to Prime Minister Modi on the night of 9th May saying that the Pakistanis would launch a very massive assault on India if we did not accept certain things. The Prime Minister was impervious to what the Pakistanis were threatening to do,” Jaishankar said.
“On the contrary, he indicated that there would be a response from us. This was the night before. And, the Pakistanis did attack us massively that night. We responded very quickly thereafter and the next morning Mr Rubio (secretary of state Marco Rubio) called me up and said the Pakistanis were ready to talk. I can only tell you from my personal experience what happened. The rest I leave to you,” he added.
Since May 10 — the day of what the US state department described as a “US-brokered ceasefire” — Trump has claimed at least 14 times that Washington played the mediator between India and Pakistan, and that he stopped the war. On many of the instances when he made this claim, the US President also said that he had threatened to cut off trade with both countries if they did not make peace.
Till date, no one in the political leadership had countered Trump publicly, prompting the Opposition, particularly the Congress, to accuse the Modi dispensation of succumbing to US pressure.
On June 18, Modi spoke to Trump for the first time since Operation Sindoor. The official readout of the conversation said: “Prime Minister Modi clearly conveyed to President Trump that at no point during this entire sequence of events (in the early days of Operation Sindoor) was there any discussion, at any level, on an India-US Trade Deal, or any proposal for a mediation by the US between India and Pakistan.”
In the Newsweek interview, Jaishankar expressed hope that trade negotiations between India and the US would reach a “successful conclusion”, emphasising the need for the two countries to find a “meeting ground”.
“And I think we’ll have to watch this space for the next few days,” he said. “You spoke about trade, yes we are in the middle, hopefully, more than the middle, of a very intricate trade negotiation,” Jaishankar added.
“Obviously, my hope would be that we bring it to a successful conclusion. I cannot guarantee it, because there’s another party to that discussion,” he said.
An Indian delegation is currently in Washington DC and discussions are ongoing over the bilateral trade agreement.