US claims at UNSC of de-escalating India-Pak Conflict; India affirms it was resolved bilaterally

United Nations: The United States brought to the Security Council President Donald Trump’s claim of having resolved the India-Pakistan conflict in May, but New Delhi reaffirmed that it was resolved bilaterally.

Acting US Representative Dorothy Shea listed on Tuesday the conflict between India and Pakistan following the terrorist massacre in Pahalgam by The Resistance Front as one of those de-escalated by “US leadership” in the last three months, repeating an assertion Trump has made often.

“The United States, under President Trump’s leadership, played an important role in encouraging the parties to reach these resolutions, which we applaud and support”, she said.

India’s Permanent Representative P Harish said firmly that it was “directly concluded” at Pakistan’s request to India.

Operation Sindoor “on achieving its primary objectives, a cessation of military activities was directly concluded at the request of Pakistan”, he said.

Harish said that Operation Sindoor, launched in retaliation for the massacre of 26 people by The Resistance Front, an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Tayiba based in and backed by Pakistan, “was focused, measured, and non-escalatory in nature”.

The operation was motivated by the Council statement on “the need to hold perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors” of the Pahalgam attack accountable, and it targeted terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, he said.

Shea and Harish were speaking at the Security Council open debate on “Multilateralism and Peaceful Settlement of Disputes” presided over by Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar.

“I stopped the war between Pakistan and India”, Trump has said repeatedly, an assertion echoed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Trump has asserted that the India-Pakistan conflict “would have been a nuclear war within another week, the way that was going”.

He claimed that he stopped it by telling the leaders of the two neighbours that unless they stopped the conflict, there would be no trade deal.

PM Modi directly told Trump during a phone call last month that there was no mediation or a quid pro quo for a trade deal between New Delhi and Washington over stopping the conflict with Pakistan, according to the External Affairs Ministry.

“Prime Minister Modi clearly conveyed to President Trump that at no point during this entire sequence of events was there any discussion, at any level, on an India-US Trade Deal, or any proposal for a mediation by the U.S. between India and Pakistan”, the ministry said.

Pakistan’s Director General of Military Operations, Major General Kashif Abdullah, directly called his Indian counterpart, Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai, to ask for a ceasefire, according to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

The other two conflicts Shea said Trump had de-escalated were those between Israel and Iran, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

Last week, Rubio announced that the US has designated The Resistance Front (TRF) as a global terrorist organisation, demonstrating “enforcing President Trump’s call for justice for the Pahalgam attack”.

IANS