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Russia is still waging its grinding war on Ukraine. Israel is only deepening its fight in Gaza. But last week, President Trump got to play peacemaker, as he announced a cease-fire after the most expansive military conflict in decades between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed powers.
He has hardly stopped talking about it since. And his freewheeling descriptions of the U.S. mediation are repeatedly poking some of India’s most politically sensitive spots, straining relations with a growing partner that had overcome decades of hesitance to reach what it thought was a place of trust with the United States.
On Tuesday, India directly contradicted a claim that Mr. Trump made both that day in Saudi Arabia and the day before in Washington as he commented on the American diplomatic efforts.
The president said he had offered to increase trade with India and Pakistan if they ceased hostilities, and had threatened to halt it if they did not. After these enticements and warnings, he said, “all of a sudden they said, I think we will stop” the fighting.
None of this was true, an official in India’s foreign ministry said at a news conference on Tuesday.
“There were conversations between Indian and U.S. leaders on the evolving military situation,” said Randhir Jaiswal, the ministry’s spokesman. “The issue of trade did not come up in any of these discussions.”
India’s strong push to rebut Mr. Trump shows its leaders’ concerns about how the Indian public will view their conduct of India’s military effort. They are worried about being perceived as having halted the confrontation under outside pressure before achieving victory against a weaker adversary, analysts said.
The U.S. involvement in ending the four days of escalating military clashes was not surprising, given that the United States has long been a force in cooling flare-ups in this part of the world.
But India expected that such intervention from a partner it was growing to trust would happen quietly and on favorable terms, especially in a standoff with Pakistan, its archenemy ever since that country’s creation 78 years ago.
In the hours after the truce was announced, the Indian government refused to publicly acknowledge the American role, insisting that the deal had been reached directly with Pakistan.
The matter of frustration in New Delhi, officials and analysts said, was less about Mr. Trump’s front-and-center presence. His penchant for taking credit is well known, as is his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize. So few were surprised that he would not wait for the two sides before making the cease-fire announcement and keep the spotlight on himself.
But the overall U.S. messaging — in which Mr. Trump also spoke of India and Pakistan on equal terms and offered to mediate issues that India considers strictly bilateral — was seen as leaving India’s political leaders vulnerable.
The unease led analysts aligned with the right-wing base of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to question India’s shift toward closer U.S. relations, describing Mr. Trump’s comments as a betrayal, whether they were a product of indifference to Indian concerns or unawareness of them.
India has long tried to isolate Pakistan as a small problem that it can handle on its own. While Pakistan was once a close ally of the United States, India thought it had helped drive a wedge between them by arguing that Pakistan was using terrorism as a proxy to wage violence against India.
During his first administration, Mr. Trump held back military aid to Pakistan over these same accusations. In the first months of his second term, the relationship between New Delhi and Washington appeared to be only deepening, with India escaping the worst of the tariffs and other shocks Mr. Trump unleashed on the world. In one sign of the closeness, India has been purchasing billions of dollars of American military equipment.
