Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said there was something amiss in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence on Donald Trump’s claims of having brokered peace between India and Pakistan, after the US President repeated it for the 25th time on Tuesday.

“Kuch na kuch toh daal mein kaala hai (There is something fishy),” the Congress MP told reporters outside Parliament when asked if the Prime Minister would reply to the forthcoming discussion on Operation Sindoor in the Lok Sabha.

“PM’s is an ongoing reply. He says Operation Sindoor is ongoing, and that we were victorious. Either we had victory or Sindoor is ongoing. On the other hand, Trump says I stopped Sindoor, he said it 25 times. Something is amiss,” Rahul said.

Although the external affairs ministry has on several occasions and minister S. Jaishankar once publicly contested Trump’s repeated claims, the Prime Minister has not once said anything on the subject in public, providing the Opposition the ammunition to use the US President’s narrative against Modi.

On Tuesday, Trump said: “We have stopped wars between India and Pakistan…. India-Pakistan was probably going to end up in a nuclear war. They shot down five planes in the last attack. It was back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I called them and I said, listen, no more trade if you do this…. They are both powerful nuclear nations…. Who knows where that would have ended up, and I stopped it…”

The Congress, which has been keeping count of Trump’s claims of brokering peace between India and Pakistan, said this was the 25th time he had made this assertion. Pondering aloud why the Prime Minister was shying away from responding to what Trump has been saying, Rahul said: “Trump has claimed 25 times that he got the ceasefire done. Who is he to order a ceasefire? It is not his job, but the Prime Minister has not responded even once to this.”

Earlier in the day, Congress communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh said: “As the Modi government continues in its refusal to give firm dates for a debate on Pahalgam-Sindoor in Parliament and as the Modi government persists in its refusal to commit to a reply by the PM in the debate, President Trump reaches the silver jubilee, the quarter century mark on his claims. He has trumpeted 25 times in the last 73 days, but the Prime Minister of India is totally quiet — finding time only to travel abroad and to destabilise democratic institutions at home.”

The government has agreed to a discussion on Operation Sindoor in both Houses, but is non-committal on whether the Prime Minister will reply to the discussion or even intervene while making a case for deferring it to next week, by when Modi is expected to return from his two-nation tour to the UK and the Maldives.

In his interaction with the media, Rahul iterated his charge that elections were being stolen in India, citing what happened in Maharashtra during the Assembly polls and the ongoing special intensive revision in Bihar.

According to the Congress leader, the BJP, having realised that its game plan of “stealing” elections had been exposed, has now taken a different route in Bihar by getting voters deleted from the electoral rolls to prepare a new voter list that suits its interests.