Playing neutral or free hand to India?: Teasing out Trump’s post-Pahalgam comment

TOI correspondent from Washington: What exactly did US President Donald Trump mean when he said India and Pakistan will “figure it out one way or the other” in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terrorist attack? One reading is that Trump is treading a neutral path, not wishing to take sides in a clash rooted in history, of which he appears to only have a vague idea. Another interpretation: he is giving India a free hand to do what it deems necessary.
At the best of times, the MAGA supremo is not known for his clarity of thought or expression. Mangled syntax, jumbled words, and incomplete sentences, are par for course. Even so, his comments on Friday about the India-Pak situation left analysts scratching their heads, including his references to the fight over Kashmir and tensions on the border “going on for a thousand years or even longer…1500 years.”
This is what Trump said when asked about the tensions: “I am very close to India and I’m very close to Pakistan, and they’ve had that fight for a thousand years in Kashmir. Kashmir has been going on for a thousand years, probably longer than that. That was a bad one (terrorist attack). There have been tensions on that border for 1,500 years. It’s been the same, but I am sure they’ll figure it out one way or the other. I know both leaders. There’s great tension between Pakistan and India, but there always has been.”
The charitable explanation from Trump supporters is that the US President was speaking only figuratively to convey that Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan have been at loggerheads for a long time, viewed through the lens of religion. They have to sort it out between themselves and there is little that the US can do.
Even an online group called United Hindu Council agreed with the reading, noting that Trump was “hinting at a much deeper history — and he’s quite right..he pointed at the centuries-old religious fault lines caused due to Islamist extremism — that have deeply scarred Kashmir’s history and continue to fuel violence today.”
But a more nuanced reading by some experts is that Trump is giving India a free hand to “sort out” Pakistan, a reading that is strengthened when one considers his “I’ll leave Bangladesh to the prime minister (Modi)” remark during the latter’s recent visit to Washington in February when he was asked about the regime change in Dhaka. Previously too he has suggested it is up to India to manage the Pakistan situation.
The “free hand to India” interpretation of Trump’s latest comment is endorsed among others by Christine Fair, a long-time South Asia analyst, whose extensive work on the region includes deep insights into Pakistan’s use of terrorist as an instrument of state policy. “That’s the right message to send even if by accident. Why should the US bail out Pakistan by trying to restrain India? Pakistan has to be taught a lesson…by India,” she noted in a post on X.
Taking a cue from the President, even the State Department, which in the past typically rushed out comments asking both sides to exercise restraint, has remained largely silent. Remarkably, Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday posted a photo of a peace treaty engineered by Washington between Congo and Rwanda, even as Trump was fulminating about Russia and Ukraine.
“Big news coming out of Africa, where I am also involved in settling violent wars and conflicts,” Trump boasted though about the Congo-Rwanda treaty, before lamenting, “I don’t know why so many of these events have fallen to me and my Administration, but they have, and we have done an unprecedented job in getting them SETTLED or, putting them in position for PEACE.”
No word though about what Washington had often described in the past as a “nuclear flashpoint,” in recognition of what has long been a Pakistan gambit to invite US intervention. Other than — “they’ll figure it out one way or the other.”