External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday firmly dismissed claims of any foreign intervention during the India-Pakistan conflict in early May this year. Intervening during the special Operation Sindoor debate in the Rajya Sabha, he iterated his government’s claim that there was no conversation between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump during the period the two countries were in a direct conflict.
“I want to tell them. ‘Kaan khol ke sun le’: There was no phone call between Prime Minister Modi and President Trump from April 22 to June 16,” the minister asserted.
He further stated that several countries were in touch with India when Operation Sindoor commenced, but the government gave a clear message to them that ”we are not open to any mediation”.
“We gave the same message to all the countries that we were not open to any mediation. Anything between us and Pakistan will only be bilateral, and that we were responding to the Pakistani attack, and we would keep responding,” he told the House.
Narrating the sequence of events on May 9 and May 10, the EAM said, “On May 9, US Vice President Vance called up the Prime Minister to warn him that a Pakistani attack would come in the next few hours. PM made it very clear that if anything happened, it would get an appropriate response… That happened, and our response disabled the Pakistani air defence systems and made their airfields inoperable.”
Following India’s response, Jaishankar said that ”we got calls (he didn’t mention from whom) saying Pakistan is ready to stop fighting”.
“The response we gave to anybody who spoke to us was that the Pakistani side has to make a request, and that request has to come through the DGMO,” he said.
He rejected the claims that the US used trade to force India and Pakistan to agree to the ceasefire, saying “There was no leader anywhere in the world who asked India to stop its operations. There was no linkage with trade. There were no calls between our Prime Minister and President Trump.”