Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has emerged as the unlikely unofficial voice for the Narendra Modi government in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor, the Indian armed forces’ precision strikes on terror camps in neighbouring Pakistan on May 7.

And the Thiruvananthapuram MP has touched upon what Prime Minister Modi left unsaid in his address to the nation on Monday evening – the issue of American meddling to force a ceasefire.

US President Donald Trump will end up with egg on his face as India will not go to negotiate at gunpoint with Pakistan – as Trump and also US secretary of state Marco Rubio have stated, Tharoor said in an interview with journalist Karan Thapar streamed before Modi’s address to the nation on Monday evening.

“We are not going to turn an entire tenet of India’s foreign policy on its head. We are not going to negotiate with a gun pointed at our head,” Tharoor, chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs, told Thapar.

Since Saturday evening, President Trump has taken credit three times for getting India and Pakistan to agree on a “full and immediate ceasefire”. On Monday, he claimed to have threatened the warring neighbours with a trade block if they did not agree to his terms.

Modi turned hawkish on Monday night as he announced that India will not succumb to nuclear blackmail; but he did not clear the air on Trump’s insistence at having played peacekeeper in the subcontinent, and his claim of offer to resolve the Kashmir issue.

Tharoor felt the US President was either not briefed properly or he did not absorb the briefing. He was optimistic enough to suggest Trump would listen to his handpicked assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, Paul Kapoor, who is yet to be confirmed by the US Senate.

Since Trump’s announcement of ceasefire, videos of Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Sushma Swaraj have emerged where each rejected any third-party interference in India’s internal affairs, including Kashmir.

Tharoor did not accept there was any mediation by the US during last week’s escalation of hostilities, something that the Opposition has started asking questions about.

“The US secretary of state may have called the external affairs minister. Then called the Pakistan side and said look India is saying if you don’t do this they won’t do that. That is not mediation,” Tharoor said. “Mediation would have been if Jaishankar had called Rubio and said could you convey this to Pakistan? That I don’t think India could have done.”

There are questions for the Indian government to answer. Like what happened to the four terrorists involved in the Pahalgam attack, three of whom were identified by the Indian agencies.

Tharoor said India should capture at least one alive to find out on whose instructions they had carried out the attack. He also suggested waiting for the Modi government to decide when, where and how to respond to queries on the damages sustained by India during the four-day battle.

A seasoned political commentator felt Tharoor’s “educated guesses” in the talk with Thapar seemed calculated enough to “make his party squirm”.

The week preceding Operation Sindoor, Tharoor had shared the dais with Modi who had remarked that the Congress MP’s presence would “disturb the sleep of some people.”

Tharoor positions himself as a “classic liberal” and on many occasions his views have been contrary to the Congress’s official stand, like on the purchase of F-35 stealth aircraft barely three months ago.

His opposition to Nehru’s Panchayati Raj, as well as to his prime political adversary in Kerala, the Left are on record. He is known to be distant from the Kerala Congress leadership.

In a chat with The Telegraph Online during a visit to Kolkata last month, Tharoor had made it clear the Congress needs to reclaim its nationalist credentials if it has to win over the voters.

In the future, near or distant, will he move to the saffron camp? The hint lies in what Tharoor had told a Delhi-based media house.

“No, every party has their own belief and history. It is not right to join other party if you can’t embrace their belief. I don’t think that is right. But there is always an option to be independent.”

Tharoor is also acutely well aware what that independence would mean without a party to fall back on.