Donald Trump (left), PM Narendra Modi (Agencies)
US President Donald Trump has once again claimed that he personally intervened to stop a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan during heightened tensions between the two neighbours, while Operation Sindoor was underway in response to the Pahalgam terror attack, earlier this year.Speaking during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he threatened India with steep tariffs and refused to proceed with a trade deal unless the conflict was resolved.“I am talking to a very terrific man, Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. I said what’s going on with you and Pakistan… The hatred was tremendous. This has been going on for a hell of a long time, like, sometimes with different names for hundreds of years,” Trump said.Trump went on to say that he issued a warning during a call with PM Modi, “I said, I don’t want to make a trade deal with you… You guys are going to end up in a nuclear war… I said, call me back tomorrow, but we’re not going to do any deals with you, or we’re going to put tariffs on you that are so high, your head’s going to spin.”Trump claimed that within five hours of the conversation, both sides had backed down. “It was done. Now maybe it starts again. I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I’ll stop it if it does. We can’t let these things happen,” he said. The US President also reiterated his claim that the conflict had resulted in the downing of several military aircraft. “That’s not good, that’s a lot of jets. 150 million dollar planes were shot down, a lot of them – seven, maybe it could be higher, they never revealed the true numbers,” he said, without providing evidence or citing official sources. Drawing a parallel with the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump said the India-Pakistan situation had the potential to escalate into a global crisis. “Just like Russia and Ukraine were going to pull the world into World War, India and Pakistan were going to end in nuclear war,” he said.Trump has made similar claims in the past, saying his intervention prevented an all-out war between the two South Asian rivals. However, India has repeatedly denied any third-party involvement in the de-escalation. Defence minister Rajnath Singh had earlier said that the ceasefire was a result of India’s own strategic decisions and that no external pressure was a factor. PM Modi himself last month in Parliament categorically refuted the claims of any third party mediation, so have other senior ministers including external affairs minister S Jaishankar and home minister Amit Shah.
