Prime Minister Narendra Modi was right to steer clear of Donald Trump’s chaotic Gaza peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday. The event, which the article dubs a “dystopian show” and a “‘Sharm-naak’ circus,” seemed designed more for Trump’s self-aggrandizement than serious diplomacy.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!A Diplomatic Snub and Its Justification
While Congress MP Shashi Tharoor questioned if Modi’s absence was a missed opportunity for India, the decision appears to be a shrewd, calculated move. Had Modi been forced to share the stage as Trump attempted to cast himself as the peacemaker between India and Pakistan, it would have been a diplomatic disaster that would have surely drawn the very ‘Sharm-naak’ (shameful) criticism Tharoor’s own party might have leveled.
India sent a junior representative, the Minister of State for External Affairs, effectively signaling strategic distance from a potentially embarrassing and low-substance affair. This strategic snub follows an earlier incident this year when Modi bypassed Trump’s plans for a meeting in Washington following the G7 summit.
The Pakistan Problem: A Staged Endorsement
The main justification for Modi’s absence became clear when Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif took the stage. In what was widely viewed as a choreographed exchange, Trump gave Sharif a five-minute spotlight.
Sharif played directly into Trump’s narrative, lauding him as a “man of peace” and once again nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Crucially, he endorsed Trump’s repeated, yet disputed, claim of personally preventing a nuclear escalation between India and Pakistan during Operation Sindoor.
The sight of Sharif holding hands with Trump, nominating him for the Nobel for “preventing an apocalypse” between India and Pakistan, perfectly illustrated the diplomatic tightrope Modi avoided.
As Sharif engaged in this sycophancy, his own country faced mounting domestic instability. Against this backdrop of Pakistan crediting a foreign leader for its own bilateral ceasefire, it’s virtually unthinkable that PM Modi would have shared a platform, validating Trump’s “wet dream of playing peacemaker” between the nuclear-armed rivals.
Modi’s decision to avoid the summit was a choice to protect India’s long-standing position that issues with Pakistan are strictly bilateral, free from third-party mediation. It denied Trump the spectacle he craved and, more importantly, denied Pakistan a symbolic diplomatic victory on the global stage.
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