New Delhi: One of the reasons for President Trump to impose punitive tariffs on India is New Delhi’s dismissal of his claim that he had brokered a peace deal with Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, a former diplomat said, according to NDTV.
Vikas Swarup, the former High Commissioner to Canada, has also pointed that Trump believes that BRICS, of which India is a member, is an anti-American alliance ‘hell-bent on creating an alternative currency to the dollar’.
However, the United States’ relationship with Pakistan, according to him, is a short-term, tactical arrangement based largely on financial interests.
‘We have to understand why these tariffs have been imposed....One, Trump is not happy with India because we are a member of BRICS...he has got this notion that BRICS is an anti-American alliance which is hell-bent on creating an alternative currency to the dollar...he feels that India should not be a member of the BRICS,’ news agency ANI quoted him as saying.
Following Trump’s claim of peace brokering, India maintained that the US played no role in it alongside stressing that the country did not accept any external mediation, further making it clear that truce was reached at the request of Pakistan's Director General of Military Operations, in a mediation held directly between the armed forces of both nations.
‘Trump has now said almost 30 times that it was he who got the two countries to stop back from the brink, who stopped a nuclear conflagration in the subcontinent. So, he is miffed that India has not acknowledged his role, whereas Pakistan has not only acknowledged his role but has even nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize,’ Swarup was quoted as saying.
Explaining further the US tactics behind tariff war, he said that this is also part of the US pressure tactics to make India sign the trade treaty allowing the US to enter India’s dairy and agriculture and genetically modified (GM) crops.
‘We have not caved in, and it is also in a way a signal to Russia because he is also frustrated that he has not been able to get President Putin to agree to the ceasefire that Zelensky has agreed to,’ he was quoted as saying.