PERSPECTIVES

A Personal Snub The Trump-Munir lunch is a strategic setback for India

- SUSHANT SINGH

“Prime Minister Modi made it clear to President Trump that India has never accepted mediation, does not accept it now, and will never accept it,” Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told Doordarshan on 18 June, shortly after Modi and Trump spoke on the phone for over half an hour. This assertion was meant to be India’s definitive rebuttal to US claims of brokering the India-Pakistan ceasefire. Within hours, Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, for a closed-door lunch at the White House, praising him as “extremely influential in stopping” the conflict. Once again, he declared: “I stopped the war between Pakistan and India.”

Trump’s repeated statements crediting himself with mediation has been a strategic blow to India’s narrative. He claimed that he threatened to stop trade with both India and Pakistan unless they ceased hostilities. “The general”—Munir—“was very impressive,” Trump boasted at the NATO summit at the Hague, a week after the lunch meeting. “Prime Minister Modi is a great friend of mine. He is a great gentleman. And I got them to reason. I said, we're not doing a trade deal if you're going to fight. And if you're going to fight each other, we’re not doing a trade deal. And you know what? They said, ‘no, I want to do the trade deal.’ We stopped a nuclear war.”

The White House lunch for Munir, unprecedented for a Pakistani army chief who does not formally hold executive power, was a calculated snub to India. It signalled three radical shifts. First, by hosting Munir, Trump elevated him to the stature of a head of state and endorsed the Pakistani military as Islamabad’s true power centre, directly undermining the Modi government’s years-long campaign to isolate it for state-sponsored terrorism.