Mumbai 27 : Rahul Gandhi of the Congress on Wednesday alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had “immediately stopped India’s action against terror camps in Pakistan following US President Donald Trump’s directions”.
Rahul Gandhi’s statement, at a Mazaffarpur rally in poll-bound Bihar as part of the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’, comes hours after Donald Trump once again doubled down on his claim of playing a catalyst in the truce between India and Pakistan following military conflict in May. The US President further claimed he personally intervened between the two nuclear-powered neighbours and used trade and tariff threats to force Prime Minister Narendra Modi into agreeing to a ceasefire with Islamabad.
“Trump said today that when the war between India and Pakistan was going on, I picked up the phone and told Narendra Modi and told him to stop whatever he was doing within 24 hours. And Narendra Modi stopped everything in five hours, not 24 hours,” the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said at the rally.
The US President has once again claimed that he stopped the India and Pakistan war from “going nuclear” by threatening to impose tariffs and refusing to do any trade deals if they did not agree to a ceasefire.
Trump’s latest comments came on Tuesday during a cabinet meeting at the White House, where he also claimed that he had spoken with Modi.
“I am talking to a very terrific man, Modi of India. I said, ‘what’s going on with you and Pakistan?’ Then I spoke to Pakistan about trade. I said, ‘what’s going on with you and India?’ This has been going on for a hell of a long time, sometimes under different names for hundreds of years,” he said.
It is to be noted that India and Pakistan became independent nations in 1947, following the end of nearly 200 years of British colonial rule in the subcontinent. Until then, they had been a single country.
Trump went on to claim that his intervention forced Islamabad to step back. “But I said, ‘what’s going on?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to make a trade deal….’ I said, ‘no, no, I don’t want to make a trade deal with you. You are going to have a nuclear war. You guys are going to end up in a nuclear war’. And that was very important to them. I said, ‘call me back tomorrow, but we are not going to do any deals with you, or we are going to put tariffs on you that are so high. I don’t give a damn. Your head’s going to spin. You are not going to end up in a war’. Within about five hours, it was done. Now, maybe it starts again, I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I will stop it if it does. We can’t let these things happen,” Trump claimed.
Trump’s comments came just hours before new tariffs totalling 50 per cent on Indian goods were set to take effect on August 27.
Since May 10, when Trump announced on social media that India and Pakistan had agreed to a “full and immediate” ceasefire after a “long night” of talks mediated by Washington, he has repeated his claim over 40 times that he “helped settle” the tensions between India and Pakistan.
India has been consistently maintaining that the understanding on cessation of hostilities with Pakistan was reached following direct talks between the Director Generals of Military Operations (DGsMO) of the two militaries.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said in Parliament that no leader of any country asked India to stop Operation Sindoor.
External affairs minister S Jaishankar has categorically said there was no third-party intervention in bringing about a ceasefire with Pakistan during Operation Sindoor.
Rahul Gandhi targets BJP, Election Commission
The Congress leader also accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of winning polls by “stealing votes with the help of the Election Commission (EC)”.
“The Gujarat model is about ‘vote chori’. The BJP started stealing people’s votes from there. The BJP wins polls by stealing votes with the help of the EC,” he said.
“We will continue to provide evidence to show how votes in the assembly and Lok Sabha polls were stolen,” Gandhi alleged.
He also demanded the Election Commission’s explanation over the “deletion” of names of 65 lakh voters as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar.
Source : Hindustan times