US President Donald Trump with PM Narendra Modi.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: India is “not going to go to war” with Pakistan, President Donald Trump has quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi telling him during the cross-border military flare-up between the two South Asian nations from May 7 to 10.
The United States president said that he had threatened to impose 350% tariffs on India and Pakistan to bring them back from the brink of a nuclear war. He also said that he had done so to prevent “nuclear dust” from “floating over Los Angeles”.
Trump reiterated his claim about brokering the May 10 ceasefire between India and Pakistan while speaking at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Though he has been disregarding New Delhi’s rebuttals and persistently repeating the claim since May 10 itself, this was the first time he quoted Modi as telling him over the phone that India would not go to war with Pakistan. This was also the first time the 47th American president claimed that he had intervened and made the two South Asian neighbours agree on a ceasefire to stop them from using nuclear weapons against each other and to save the US from nuclear dust.
“…I’m good at settling disputes, and I've always been. I’ve done very well with that over the years, even before this. I was talking about the different wars… India, Pakistan... they were going to go at it, nuclear weapons,” said the US president.
After the terrorists, who had come from Pakistan and the areas illegally occupied by Pakistan, killed 26 people – mostly tourists – at Baisaran in Pahalgam in J&K, India launched ‘Operation Sindoor’ early on May 7, targeting the training camps of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) across its Line of Control (LoC) as well as the undisputed stretch of its border with its western neighbour. Pakistan responded by targeting military facilities and the civilian population in India. The cross-border flare-up came to its end with a ceasefire on May 10.
Trump said that he had conveyed to New Delhi and Islamabad that they could keep fighting against each other, but he would put a 350% tariff on both nations, and they would find it difficult to continue trade with the US. He said that both India and Pakistan had told him not to impose tariffs on them, but he had replied: “I'm going to do it. Come back to me and I'll take it down. But I'm not going to have you guys shooting nuclear weapons at each other, killing millions of people and having the nuclear dust floating over Los Angeles. I'm not going to do it”.
He said that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan had called him and thanked him, in front of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, for saving millions of lives by brokering the ceasefire.
He also claimed that he had “got a call from Prime Minister Modi saying, ‘we're done’”. He had then asked Modi: “You're done with what?” Trump claimed that Modi had replied: “We're not going to go to war”. He had then thanked Modi and said, “Let's make a deal”, according to the account of the exchanges between Washington D.C. and New Delhi presented by the US president.
New Delhi, over the past three months, repeatedly refuted the US claim about brokering the ceasefire that ended the four-day cross-border military offensive and counter-offensive between India and Pakistan. Modi, himself, dismissed the claim during a phone call with Trump on June 17, as well as during a debate in the Lok Sabha on July 29.