Jaishankar reveals real story behind 'Modi ji ne war rukva di papa'

Prime Minister Narendra Modi made two interventions during India's evacuation mission in Ukraine – once in Kharkiv and the second in Sumy, S Jaishankar said.

External affairs minister S Jaishankar said there were two occasions when Prime Minister Narendra Modi intervened to stop shelling between Russia and Ukraine to ensure Indian students were taken out of the war zone safely. In an exclusive interview with Hindustan Times' R Sukumar and Shishir Gupta, Jaishankar said 'Modi ji ne war rukva di papa' is the most frequently asked question to him as people are genuinely interested to know what Narendra Modi did to stop the war.

External affairs minister S Jaishankar spoke about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention in the Russia-Ukraine war during India's evacuation of its students from Ukraine.

There were two episodes: one in Kharkiv and the other in Sumy, Jaishankar said. The first one was in Kharkiv which at that time was under artillery shelling and India worked out a safe zone to extricate the students who were walking out of the city as there was no other transport. "Now, while this was under progress, shelling started again very close to the vicinity of the safe zone. So on that occasion, the Prime Minister spoke to President Putin, and specifically told him, ‘Look, this was an agreement between your people and our people, this is happening. So I would request you to personally have someone look into this and stop it’ -- which it did. It took a few hours, but the Russian shelling stopped and the buses went there to pick them up and brought them out," Jaishankar said.

The second episode of Sumy took place later when everyone else got out of Ukraine, Jaishankar said referring to the 'war rukva di papa' campaign. "It was a particularly complicated place, because other than the Russian military and the Ukrainian military, there was also a kind of a Ukrainian militia which didn’t seem to be under anybody’s particular command and control. So everybody was firing at everybody else. And the students started getting more and more agitated because they felt everybody else was leaving," the external affairs minister explained.

India made two calls at that time --Narendra Modi spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. "I requested the PM, saying that look, you will have to speak to Putin and Zelensky, which he was very willing to do and he actually spoke to both of them and told them ‘Look, this is very, very important, you know, we want your forces to stand down and give us a pathway and my officials will work out the details’. So, they passed the instructions down. I was actually sitting with the PM, and he called up Putin and Zelensky," Jaishankar said.