Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday raised sharp questions at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanding an explanation about the US President Donald Trump's "five jets shot down" claims made in his speech.
In a post in Hindi on X, Gandhi said, "Modi ji, what is the truth about the 5 ships? The country has the right to know!"
This comes after Donald Trump once again claimed to have halted the escalation of the India-Pakistan conflict on Saturday.
Speaking at the White House during a dinner he hosted for Republican senators on Friday, Trump said, "We stopped a lot of wars. And these were serious, India and Pakistan, that were going on. Planes were being shot out of there. I think five jets were shot down, actually. These are two serious nuclear countries, and they were hitting each other. You know, it seems like a new form of warfare. You saw it recently when you looked at what we did in Iran, where we knocked out their nuclear capability, totally knocked out that."
However, Trump did not specify whether the jets were lost by either of the two countries or if he was referring to combined losses. The US President also reiterated his remarks that there would be no trade deal with India and Pakistan if the conflict continued.
"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," Trump said.
Joining the attack against Centre, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram questioned the government's silence and credibility. "After President Trump's latest statement, what does the government of India have to say? Silence is no answer," he wrote in a post on X.
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 in the day, Congress MP Jairam Ramesh took a dig at PM Modi over his "friendship and hugomacy" with US President while demanding 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 emphasised the threat of "no trade deal" if the war continued.
India has repeatedly said that the cessation of hostilities with Pakistan following the success of Operation Sindoor did not come about due to any mediation, and it happened after Pakistan's DGMO called his Indian counterpart, according to ANI.
BJP hits back
The BJP IT department head Amit Malviya on Saturday lambasted Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, accusing him of having a "traitor's mindset" after he demanded a clarification from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on US President Donald Trump's latest remarks on India-Pakistan military conflict.
Reacting sharply to the Congress leader's demand, Malviya posted on X, "Rahul Gandhi's mindset is that of a traitor." Underlining that Trump neither took the name of India nor said that those five jets belonged to it, Malviya asked, "Then why did the Congress scion believe that they belonged to India? Why did he not believe that they belonged to Pakistan? Does he have more sympathy for Pakistan than his own country?" The truth is that Pakistan has not yet recovered from Operation Sindoor, but "Rahul Gandhi is feeling the pain," Malviya wrote in Hindi.
"Rahul Gandhi should clarify -- Is he an Indian or the spokesperson of Pakistan?" he asserted.
(With inputs from agencies)
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