As Trump crows over ending a conflict, India’s leaders feel betrayed

NEW DELHI – Russia is still waging its grinding war on Ukraine. Israel is only deepening its fight in the Gaza Strip.

But last week, US President Donald Trump got to play peacemaker, as he announced a ceasefire after the most expansive military conflict in decades between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed powers.

He has hardly stopped talking about it since.

And his freewheeling descriptions of the US mediation are repeatedly poking some of India’s most politically sensitive spots, straining relations with a growing partner that had overcome decades of hesitance to reach what it thought was a place of trust with the US.

On May 13, India directly contradicted a claim that Mr Trump made both that day in Saudi Arabia and the day before in Washington as he commented on the US diplomatic efforts.

The President said he had offered to increase trade with India and Pakistan if they ceased hostilities, and had threatened to halt it if they did not. After these enticements and warnings, he said, “all of a sudden they said, ‘I think we will stop’” the fighting.

None of this was true, an official in India’s Foreign Ministry said at a news conference said on May 13.

“There were conversations between Indian and US leaders on the evolving military situation,” said Mr Randhir Jaiswal, the ministry’s spokesperson. “The issue of trade did not come up in any of these discussions.”

India’s strong push to rebut Mr Trump shows its leaders’ concerns about how the Indian public will view their conduct in India’s military effort.

They are worried about being perceived as having halted the confrontation under outside pressure before achieving victory against a weaker adversary, analysts said.

The US involvement in ending the four days of escalating military clashes was not surprising, given that the US has long been a force in cooling flare-ups in this part of the world.

But India expected that such intervention from a partner it was growing to trust would happen quietly and on favourable terms, especially in a stand-off with Pakistan, its arch enemy ever since that country’s creation 78 years ago.

In the hours after the truce was announced, the Indian government refused to publicly acknowledge the American role, insisting that the deal had been reached directly with Pakistan.

The matter of frustration in New Delhi, officials and analysts said, was less about Mr Trump’s front-and-centre presence.

His penchant for taking credit is well known, as is his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize. So few were surprised that he would not wait for the two sides before making the ceasefire announcement and keep the spotlight on himself.

But the overall US messaging – in which Mr Trump also spoke of India and Pakistan on equal terms and offered to mediate issues that India considers strictly bilateral – was seen as leaving India’s political leaders vulnerable.

The unease led analysts aligned with the right-wing base of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to question India’s shift towards closer US relations, describing Mr Trump’s comments as a betrayal, whether they were a product of indifference to Indian concerns or unawareness of them.

India has long tried to isolate Pakistan as a small problem that it can handle on its own.

While Pakistan was once a close ally of the US, India thought it had helped drive a wedge between them by arguing that Pakistan was using terrorism as a proxy to wage violence against India.

During his first administration, Mr Trump held back military aid to Pakistan over these same accusations.

In the first months of his second term, the relationship between New Delhi and Washington appeared to be only deepening, with India escaping the worst of the tariffs and other shocks Mr Trump unleashed on the world.

In one sign of the closeness, India has been purchasing billions of dollars of American military equipment.

Immediately after the deadly terrorist attack in April that sent tensions soaring between India and Pakistan, Mr Trump was among the first world leaders to call Mr Modi and offer support.

Trump administration officials said they strongly backed India’s fight against terrorism, which New Delhi saw as a green light for its military action.

What irritated India, officials and analysts said, was that in announcing the ceasefire, Mr Trump had offered gracious words for both sides.

He made no mention of how the confrontation had started with a terrorist attack that killed 26 civilians in Indian-controlled Kashmir, a massacre that India has linked to Pakistan.

The US President spoke of future negotiations on the competing claims by India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region, something that India has long declared non-negotiable.

On May 13 in Saudi Arabia, Mr Trump said that both countries had very “powerful” and “strong” leaders, and that they might now “go out and have a nice dinner together”.

That image rankles in India. “When Mr Trump comes in and says, you know, ‘I spoke to both sides,’ he’s kind of equating,” said Mrs Nirupama Menon Rao, a former Indian ambassador to Washington.

Mrs Rao said that the American approach had complicated India’s decades of efforts to be viewed independently, not through the lens of conflict with Pakistan.

India has re-oriented its foreign policy to position itself as the US’ key partner in the region, increasingly willing to play the role of counterweight to China, a country that has become Pakistan’s most powerful patron.

“India and Pakistan are being hyphenated once again,” Mrs Rao said. “India had genuinely felt that we had broken free of that hyphenation and that Pakistan had kind of receded into the shadows as far as the US was concerned.”

Mixed messaging from the Trump administration also vexed Indian officials.

After India first struck Pakistan on May 7, Vice-President J.D. Vance, who had been on a visit to India when the terrorist attack took place on April 22, told Fox News that the escalating conflict was “fundamentally none of our business”.

While some saw that as the reflexive answer of an at-times isolationist US presidency, others in New Delhi thought it was a continued green light for India’s military actions.

But in the following days, Mr Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio became the anchors of an urgent diplomatic effort to end the fighting.

According to both US and Indian accounts of the diplomacy, alarm had grown after India struck an airfield within 24km of both the Pakistani military headquarters and the unit that oversees and protects the country’s nuclear arsenal.

A senior Indian official said that India, before hitting Pakistan, had been in communication with the Trump administration about its intent to do so, and that it had briefed Mr Trump’s advisers after the initial strikes.

Once the conflict escalated, the official said, Mr Vance called Mr Modi to share the US concern about “a high probability of a dramatic escalation of violence”.

Mr Modi listened, but India made its own decision to end the fighting, the official said, after another night of clashes in which Indian forces struck several Pakistani bases.

Pakistan requested a direct call to discuss arrangements for a ceasefire, the official said.

While many commentators close to Mr Modi’s support base saw the US messaging around the truce as “treachery”, other observers said India had been too optimistic to expect unequivocal support from Washington and a full American divorce from Pakistan.

“The last few days have been hard on India. India’s battles against Pakistan-sponsored terror have been invariably lonely ones,” Ms Indrani Bagchi, a New Delhi-based foreign policy analyst, said on social platform X.

“The US and China may be strategic rivals everywhere. But they come together in Pakistan. That reality has not changed.” NYTIMES