New York, Aug 9 (IANS) US President Donald Trump has claimed that he “got things settled” between India and Pakistan during their “conflict” in May through trade, even though in reality, there is no deal with India.
“I got things settled with India, Pakistan [and] I think it was trade more than any other reason,” he said on Friday.
India has denied that trade came up in any of the discussions with US leaders during Operation Sindoor or that Trump mediated a truce.
Soon after Trump first made the claim after the cessation of hostilities in May, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said, “The issue of trade or tariff did not come up in any of those discussions.”
Trade negotiations between India and the US are at a stalemate and Trump has unilaterally set a 25 per cent tariff on India.
Trump also speculated that the additional punitive tariff of 25 per cent that he said he was putting on India could have spurred Moscow to make progress towards a peace deal with Ukraine.
“I think that a lot of things happened recently that would make this go forward,” he said.
“I’m not going to mention anything having to do with India,” Trump added.
Singling out India for the punitive tariff for buying Russian oil was seen as his attempt to put economic pressure on Moscow, as it could lose oil revenue from New Delhi, the second-biggest customer.
While Trump said on Truth Social that he concluded a trade deal with Pakistan on July 30 and that it involves joint oil reserves development, neither side gave full details, if indeed there was such a deal.
Trump imposed a 19 per cent tariff on Pakistan the next day, but nothing was said about what Islamabad had offered the US, which was reported in other deals.
Without a deal, India’s tariff was set at 25 per cent.
Trump made the claim about using trade in the India-Pakistan “conflict” on Friday at a ceremony where Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a peace agreement to end their conflict of over 35 years.
The two leaders lauded Trump for bringing them together and said that they would jointly nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Pakistan’s military chief Asim Munir, who joined Trump in asserting that the latter brokered the ceasefire, had nominated him for a Nobel Prize.
Operation Sindoor ended when Pakistan’s Director General of Military Operations Major General Kashif Abdullah called his Indian counterpart Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai to ask for a ceasefire.
India launched the operation in May against Pakistan-based terrorist organisations after the Pahalgam attack in April claimed 26 lives, and the neighbouring country escalated it.
Trump, repeating his claims about ending the India-Pakistan “conflict”, asserted, “I said, ‘You know, I don’t want to be dealing with countries that are trying to blow up themselves and maybe the world’.”
They are “nuclear nations”, and “that was a big one, getting that one settled”, he said.
“They were going at it, you know, they were shooting airplanes out of the sky. You know, they five or six planes got shot down in their last little skirmish,” Trump said.
“And then it was going to escalate from there. That could have gotten to be very, very big,” the US President added.
–IANS
arul/svn
