Congress leader Pawan Khera on Wednesday shared a video of US President Donald Trump claiming credit for averting a war between India and Pakistan. In the clip, Trump says he spoke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir, and credited both for defusing tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
"I stopped the war. I love Pakistan. I think Modi is a fantastic man. I spoke to him last night. We are going to make a trade deal with PM Modi. I stopped the war between Pakistan and India. This man (Asim Munir) was extremely influential in stopping it from the Pakistani side and PM Modi from the Indian side. Both are nuclear countries; they got to stop. I stopped a war between two major nuclear nations,” Trump says.
Trump’s comments came hours before the US President’s lunch with Munir and contradicted the Indian government’s version of events.
On Wednesday morning, India’s foreign secretary Vikram Misri had stated that Modi told Donald Trump “that India has never accepted third-party mediation and will not accept such mediation” in a phone conversation before Trump hosts Pakistan Army chief Munir for lunch.
Modi told Trump that in this entire chain of events of Operation Sindoor there was no discussion of an India-US trade deal and there was no reference to US mediation between India and Pakistan, Misri said.
"One has to feel a bit sorry for the Foreign Secretary - left to clean up after a government that can’t keep its own narrative intact. Just this morning, he insisted that Prime Minister Modi told President Trump the May ceasefire between India and Pakistan was achieved solely through military-to-military dialogue, with no American involvement. But just hours later, Trump himself blew that claim to bits, boasting once again that he brokered the ceasefire between two nuclear powers by dangling trade as leverage," Khera said on Wednesday.
"So much for diplomatic coherence. Donald Trump isn’t using a senior official to claim that he mediated between India and Pakistan. He has been saying it himself. Public claims made by President Trump simply cannot be countered by proxy. Prime Minister Modi must publicly reject President Trump’s claims - if they are incorrect," the Congress leader wrote.
India and Pakistan reached a ceasefire on May 10 to end the conflict after four days of intense cross-border drone and missile strikes.
On May 11, Trump claimed on social media that India and Pakistan had agreed to a “full and immediate” ceasefire after a “long night” of talks mediated by Washington. He has repeated the claim over a dozen times that he “helped settle” the tensions between India and Pakistan.
Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has accused Modi of surrendering to pressure from Trump and remaining silent on the ceasefire claim because "it is the truth".
“Trump has said eleven times that I made Narendra Modi surrender. He has said this eleven times publicly. Narendra Modi is not being able to utter a single word. PM Modi is not being able to say that Trump is lying, because it is the truth,” said Gandhi on June 6, addressing a conference in Bihar.
Earlier, in Bhopal, Gandhi claimed that during Operation Sindoor, Trump had called Modi and told him, “Narendra, surrender.”
