Ahead of the upcoming Monsoon session, the Congress party Saturday demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi give a “clear and categorical” statement in Parliament on US President Donald Trump’s claims on the India-Pakistan conflict — the latest being the one where he said “five jets were shot down” in May this year.

Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi questioned the PM’s “silence” and asked him to clarify this claim as the “country has the right to know the truth”. In a post in Hindi on X, he wrote: “Modiji, what is the truth about the five jets? The country has a right to know!”

“The Trump missile gets fired” for the 24th time with the same two messages just two days before the Monsoon Session of Parliament begins, Congress general secretary in-charge (Communications) Jairam Ramesh said. He also pointed out that Trump has again stated that the US stopped the war between the two neighbouring countries.

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In his latest statement, Trump also repeated his claim that the cross-border fighting ended following his intervention. But he did not specify whether the jets were lost by either of the two countries or if he was referring to combined losses.

“The prime minister, who has had years of friendship and huglomacy with President Trump going back to ‘Howdy Modi’ in September 2019 and ‘Namaste Trump’ in February 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,” Ramesh added.

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Speaking at the White House during a dinner he hosted for 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.”

“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.

Further, the Congress’ whip in the Lok Sabha, Manicakam Tagore, also attacked the government over Trump’s remarks. “Trump boasts about preventing a nuclear conflict using ‘trade pressure’. Pakistan applauds him. They’ve even proposed a Nobel Prize. So what really happened? And why is Modi in Maun Viraat mode?” he said on X.

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“If 5 fighter jets were really shot down, as Trump says, the nation deserves to know: Who authorised retaliation? What role did the US play? Did India cave to foreign pressure?” the Congress leader said. Silence cannot be the official response, he added.

Since May, Trump has repeated his claim at least 20 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.

India has consistently maintained that the two sides halted their military actions with a ceasefire on May 10 following direct talks between their militaries without any mediation by the US.

With PTI inputs