India's foreign minister S Jaishankar has sought to clear the air about the idea that US President Donald Trump effected the ceasefire between India and Pakistan when the neighbours got into a massive escalation after a terror attack in Kashmir's Pahalgam in April.
Referring to India's Operation Sindoor, he charted the series of events from what he termed his “personal experience”, in an interview with the US-based magazine Newsweek in New York.
He said he was in the room when US Vice-President JD Vance spoke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi “on the night of May 9”. Vance said, according to Jaishankar, that the Pakistanis would launch “a very massive assault” on India.
“We did not accept certain things, and the Prime Minister was impervious to what the Pakistanis were threatening to do… On the contrary, he (Modi) indicated that there would be a response from us.”
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Indeed, on the night of May 9, the Pakistanis attacked "massively", he said, adding that Indian forces responded “very quickly”.
{{/usCountry}}Indeed, on the night of May 9, the Pakistanis attacked "massively", he said, adding that Indian forces responded “very quickly”.
{{/usCountry}}The next morning (May 10), Jaishankar said, the engagement was between him and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told him that the Pakistanis were ready to talk. Then, in the afternoon, Pakistan's Director General of Military Operations, Major General Kashif Abdullah, directly called his Indian counterpart, Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai, to ask for a ceasefire, Jaishankar added.
Jaishankar counters Trump's trade claim
While President Trump has been insisting that he got the ceasefire done, and that he used trade as the leverage, Jaishankar stressed that diplomacy and trade were not interlinked in this case.
"I think the trade people are doing what the trade people should be doing, which is negotiate with numbers and lines and products and do their tradeoffs," he said, referring to a possible trade deal soon between India and the US.
Trump, meanwhile, has repeated his claim of having stopped “nuclear war”, and “prevented deaths of millions”, by telling them he won’t do a trade deal with either of them if they didn’t heed to him.
“I ended that with a series of phone calls on trade,” Trump said last week, too: “I said, 'Look, if you're gonna go fighting each other ... we're not doing any trade deal’… They responded that ‘you have to do a trade deal’.”
Jaishankar, while explaining his country’s stance, said India no longer differentiates between terror proxies and their sponsors.