WASHINGTON/NEW DELHI: US President Donald Trump has said he believes up to five military aircraft were shot down during the recent conflict between India and Pakistan that erupted following the Pahalgam attack in April.
Trump, who made his remarks at a dinner he hosted for some Republican US lawmakers at the White House, did not specify which side’s jets he was referring to. The US leader said: “In fact, planes were being shot out of the air. Five, five, four or five, but I think five jets were shot down actually.”
The hostilities between the nuclear-armed neighbours followed an attack in April that New Delhi blamed — without any evidence — on Pakistan-based militants, a charge Islamabad firmly denies. In retaliation, the Pakistan Air Force swung into action and shot down five Indian fighter jets in aerial battles, including three advanced French-made Rafales.
While officially India has refused to confirm the loss of aircraft but when asked by a Bloomberg correspondent in June if Pakistan was accurate in its claim that up to six Indian jets were downed, India’s Chief of Defence Staff Anil Chauhan responded, “What is important is why they went down,” appearing to confirm losses without specifying a number.
In his remarks to Republican senators on Friday, Trump said: “You had India, Pakistan, that was going in fact, planes were being shot out of the air four or five. But I think five jets were shot down actually that was getting worse and worse, wasn’t it? That was looking like it was going to go, these are two serious nuclear countries, and they were hitting each other,” he said.
“But India and Pakistan were going at it, and they were back and forth, and it was getting bigger and bigger. And we got it solved through trade. We said. ‘You guys want to make a trade deal. We’re not making a trade deal if you’re going to be throwing around weapons and maybe nuclear weapons’. Both very powerful nuclear states,” Trump said.
He said his administration achieved more in six months than almost any other administration could accomplish in eight years. “Something I’m very proud of, we stopped a lot of wars, a lot of wars. And these were serious wars,” Trump said.
Since May 10, Trump has repeatedly asserted several times on various occasions that he helped settle the tensions between India and Pakistan and that he told the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours that America will do a “lot of trade” with them if they stopped the conflict. On June 18, President Trump hosted Pakistan Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir for a lunch meeting at the White House.
Following Trump’s statement, India’s top opposition leader has demanded an explanation from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“Modi ji, what is the truth about the 5 [jets]? The country has the right to know!” Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said in a post on X, slamming the prime minister, who has been under severe criticism from the opposition after India’s failure in brief war with Pakistan. He further added, “I would like to believe the government of India, but if the government does not state the truth — actually does not say anything at all on the outcomes of the 5-day war — what do we believe?”
Earlier on Saturday, Congress MP Jairam Ramesh took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his “friendship and huglomacy” with US president while demanding a clarification regarding the “five jets shot down” claims made by the latter in his latest speech.
“The sensational new revelation by President Trump this time around is that five jets may have been downed. The prime minister, who has had years of friendship and ‘huglomacy’ with President Trump going back to ‘Howdy Modi’ in Sept 2019 and ‘Namaste Trump’ in Feb 2020, has to now himself make a clear and categorical statement in parliament on what President Trump has been claiming over the past 70 days,” the Congress Rajya Sabha MP posted on X.
Ramesh said that the US president remains fixated on his intervention to stop the war between the two nuclear nations and emphasized the threat of “no trade deal” if the war continued.
