US President Donald Trump claimed credit for ending military hostilities between India and Pakistan in May and sought to seek New Delhi’s endorsement for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination during a June 17 phone call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
The June 17 phone call came after Donald Trump repeatedly claimed he had “solved” the military conflict between India and Pakistan,(AFP FILE)
The call came after Trump repeatedly claimed he had “solved” the military conflict between India and Pakistan, which erupted when India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7 to target terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan in retaliation for the Pahalgam terror attack. Trump has continued to repeat this claim since then despite pushback from New Delhi.
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During the phone call on June 17, Trump said “how proud he was of ending the military escalation” and “mentioned that Pakistan was going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize”, the Times reported, citing interviews with unnamed people in New Delhi and Washington. “The not-so-subtle implication, according to people familiar with the call, was that Mr Modi should do the same,” the report said.
The PM reportedly told Trump that US involvement “had nothing to do with the recent cease-fire”, and that matters had been “settled directly between India and Pakistan”. The report added, “Mr Trump largely brushed off Mr Modi’s comments, but the disagreement – and Mr Modi’s refusal to engage on the Nobel – has played an outsize role in the souring relationship between the two leaders…”
There was no response from Indian officials to the report. People familiar with the matter questioned the account in the report and pointed to a statement made by foreign secretary Vikram Misri on June 18 that recounted the phone conversation.
At the time, Misri had said Modi told Trump that the decision by India and Pakistan to halt military actions in May was made directly during talks between the armies of the two sides and without any mediation by the US.
Trump had initiated the phone call after the two leaders were unable to meet on the margins of the G7 Summit in Canada because of the president’s return to the US ahead of schedule.
In the 35-minute conversation, Modi told Trump that “India has never accepted mediation, does not and will never do so”, Misri said. Modi also made it clear to Trump that during the four days of military clashes between India and Pakistan, issues such as the “India-US trade deal or mediation by the US between India and Pakistan” were not discussed “at no time [or] at any level”.
The White House did not acknowledge the phone call and Trump didn’t post about it on his social media accounts.
India has never accepted mediation by any third party in handling issues with Pakistan. The US, however, has stepped in to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan on several occasions, including the Kargil border war in 1999 and the Pulwama suicide bombing of 2019 that brought the two sides to the brink of war.
Trump was the first to announce the halting of hostilities between India and Pakistan on May 10 and an official American readout had even described the development as a ceasefire brokered by the US. Since then, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he got India and Pakistan to stop fighting, and that he used the threat of stopping trade with both countries in these efforts.
Weeks after the June 17 phone call, and even as talks on an India-US bilateral trade deal were on, Trump announced that Indian goods would be subject to a 25% reciprocal tariff. He followed this up with an additional 25% punitive tariff for buying Russian oil, putting strain on bilateral ties.
Trump has also continued to talk about deserving a Nobel Peace Prize for his reported efforts to end conflicts around the world. “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the war between India and Pakistan,” Trump said in a social media post in June. “No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do.”