US President Donald Trump has done it again. On Tuesday, he made a strong claim that his administration brokered a historic ceasefire between India and Pakistan. He said in Riyadh, his first overseas trip in his second term “I said let’s make a deal, let’s do some trading. Let’s not trade nuclear missiles. Let’s trade the things you make so beautifully”. According to him, that’s how he successfully convinced India and Pakistan for a truce. He hinted at being a peacemaker and unifier. To stress his peacemaker role, he cited the role he played in the Indo-Pakistan ceasefire and other conflicts. In fact, he was the first one to break the news of the ceasefire on May 10, obviously taking the Indian political and military leadership by surprise. He did not stop there, though. A day later, he offered to mediate between India and Pakistan to solve the Kashmir issue. That must have come as a big shock to New Delhi as it has always maintained that Kashmir was a bilateral issue that needed no third-party intervention. That has been the stated stand of India from the beginning and remains so. Quite expectedly, India outright rejected Trump’s mediation offer.

Coming to the current conflict, India attacked nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) in the early hours of May 7 under Operation Sindoor to destroy key bases of terrorist groups and their training dens following a barbaric terrorist attack in Pahalgam. In its first statement after carrying out the precision strikes, the Indian government stated that the military action was focussed, measured and non-escalatory in nature. Later in the day, the Centre made it amply clear that it had no intention of going to war with Pakistan and would respond only to Pakistan’s military actions with similar intensity. When India has no intention of a war with Pakistan, where is a need for it to seek a ceasefire with the US support? This clearly shows that Pakistan approached the US for help as the intensity of India’s retaliatory attacks increased. And the US used the opportunity to its advantage.

But Donald Trump’s unsolicited offers of mediation on Jammu & Kashmir are turning out to be a big challenge for India. For the past several years, India has been trying to play a bigger role in geopolitics. For this, it has been leveraging its rapid rise on the economic front. It is aiming to be the third largest economy in the next few years. The size of an economy matters a lot in geopolitics because a country’s military strength is linked to the soundness of its economy. That’s the reason why the world looks to the US and China whenever there is a major conflict. In recent years, India also announced its arrival on the global stage by trying to find a peaceful solution to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. It also played a key role when Sri Lanka landed in an economic mess and when Myanmar was hit by a massive earthquake. In this backdrop, it is to be seen how the Indian government handles the tricky situation it has found itself in post Trump’s

pronouncements and puts spotlight back on the ‘rising India’ story at global level as it navigates some key challenges after the abrupt ceasefire.