Will Opposition up the ante on ‘US role’ in India-Pakistan ceasefire declaration?

Sources said that as time passed and calm settled over the country, the party will start asking more questions over the timeline of what has happened since the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22

The Opposition Congress is looking to up the ante on the ceasefire announcement that came on Saturday and is likely to raise the role of the US in bringing about truce between the two countries.

Sources within the Congress told The Indian Express that as time passed and calm settled over the country, the party will start asking more questions over the timeline of what has happened since the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22, and over the claims made by the government. “India has always maintained a stand that third party negotiations between India and Pakistan are not done. Then how did Donald Trump announce the ceasefire? We will be raising these questions in the coming days,” said a senior party leader in Delhi.

Many Congress leaders pointed out that there have been interventions by the US in the past whenever tensions between India and Pakistan came to a flashpoint, but Washington never made those backchannel efforts public. In that sense, the ceasefire, they said, could have been choreographed better.
 

Addressing a press conference to spell out the party line, CWC member Sachin Pilot said, “This was the first time that the announcement for the ceasefire was made by the US President on social media. And what he wrote on his social media is also worth paying attention to. The new step that we saw to internationalise the issue between India and Pakistan is very surprising.”

Stating that Rubio’s mention of a “neutral site” for an India-Pakistan dialogue raises “many questions”, Congress communication head Jairam Ramesh asked, “Have we abandoned the Simla Agreement? Have we opened the doors to third-party mediation?”
 

“If diplomatic channels between India and Pakistan are being reopened, what commitments have we sought and got?” Ramesh asked.

The Congress continued to recall Indira Gandhi in the context of liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. Senior Congress leader and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs Shashi Tharoor, however, said that the circumstances of the war of 1971 and the current situation are different.

“…The truth is that the circumstances of 1971 are not the circumstances of 2025. There are differences… This was not a war that we intend to continue. We just wanted to teach terrorists a lesson, and that lesson has been taught. I am sure the government will continue trying to identify and track the specific individuals who did the horrors of Pahalgam,