Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stayed away from a regional leaders summit in Malaysia to avoid meeting US President Donald Trump and having a possible discussion about Pakistan, Bloomberg reported, quoting people familiar with the matter.
The Indian prime minister was initially supposed to attend the meeting in person. However, he changed his plans at the eleventh hour and decided to participate in it virtually.
According to the Bloomberg report, the officials in the government were apprehensive that Trump would repeat his claim that he mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, which India has consistently denied.
Modi didn’t want to risk a meeting with Trump that could end up being embarrassing for the prime minister, especially with a crucial state election in Bihar set to begin next week.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stayed away from a regional leaders summit in Malaysia this week to avoid meeting US President Donald Trump and having a possible discussion about Pakistan, people familiar with the matter said.
This comes after the two leaders spoke on the phone on the occasion of Diwali last week. Speaking to the reporters after the call, Trump said he told Modi not to have a war with Pakistan.
“We talked about trade – we talked about a lot of things, but mostly the world of trade, he’s very interested in that. Although we did talk a little while ago about let’s have no wars with Pakistan,” he said.
Relations between India and the US have soured since the Pakistan conflict five months ago, with Trump slapping 50% tariffs on Indian exports in August, half of which is a penalty for the South Asian nation’s purchases of Russian oil. Trade negotiations have dragged on since then, without any clear sign of a deal yet.
Earlier this month, President Trump claimed that Modi had assured him India would stop buying Russian oil – a claim Indian External Ministry denied.
Modi has since avoided going to two regional summits where he could potentially meet Trump. According to Bloomberg, Modi’s team didn’t see any clear outcomes from a possible bilateral meeting with Trump in Malaysia, the people said. A call between the two leaders last week hadn’t met New Delhi’s expectations, one of the people said.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Modi is campaigning for his party in a crucial state election that kicks off next week, and he didn’t want to risk a meeting with Trump that could end up being embarrassing for the prime minister, the people said.
Modi is the main face of his party’s campaign in Bihar state, and any comments by Trump, especially regarding Pakistan, could be used by the prime minister’s rivals against him and damage his party’s chances at the polls, they said.
Trump has insisted several times that he played a pivotal role in ending hostilities between Pakistan and India, saying he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his effort in resolving that conflict and others. A key part of his trip to Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, this week was to oversee the signing of a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia.
On Tuesday, Trump again referred to his role in the India-Pakistan ceasefire, saying he’d prevented a possible nuclear war by using trade deals as a negotiating tool.
“I said to Prime Minister Modi, and I said to the Prime Minister, very nice man and very good man – and the Field Marshal over in Pakistan, I said, ‘Look, we’re not going to do any trade if you’re going to be fighting’,” Trump said at an event in Tokyo.
The response was “No, no, no. One thing has nothing to do with the other,” the US president said. “I said, ‘It has a lot to do with the other’.”
In contrast to India’s position, Pakistan has given Trump credit for securing a ceasefire and nominated him for the Nobel prize. The US president has, in turn, heaped praise on Pakistan’s Army Chief Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who he called “great people” on Sunday.
Modi’s absence from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Kuala Lumpur was unusual. Since taking power in 2014, the prime minister has attended all the leaders’ meetings, except in 2022. In 2020 and 2021, the ASEAN summits were held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Modi and Trump previously shared a close bond, campaigning for each other in elections. That relationship has now been heavily criticised by Modi’s rivals, like Rahul Gandhi, a top leader in the main Indian National Congress opposition group.
“PM Modi is frightened of Trump,” Gandhi said recently in a social media post highlighting the prime minister’s silence against Trump.
Ties between the two leaders went downhill after a tense 35-minute conversation in June where they directly discussed the conflict, Bloomberg News previously reported. Modi and Trump have subsequently patched up and spoken to each other at least three times since September.
Despite those calls, Modi’s decision to skip the summit shows his hesitancy to engage directly with Trump, whose unpredictable comments in front of the media have led to embarrassing moments for other leaders, such as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa.
Modi gave a virtual speech at the ASEAN summit on Sunday, instead. His foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, met US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, where the two discussed bilateral ties.
Rubio earlier told reporters that the US’s relations with Pakistan don’t come at the expense of India.
Modi is scheduled to attend the Group of 20 leaders summit in Johannesburg next month, where he’ll have face time with leaders, people familiar with the matter said. They didn’t rule out the possibility that the prime minister and Trump could meet in the coming months if trade talks progress.