New Delhi: US President Donald Trump on Friday claimed that “five jets were shot down” in the recent conflict between India and Pakistan. His remarks, made at a private dinner with Republican lawmakers at the White House, did not specify which country’s aircraft were downed.
“In fact, planes were being shot out of the air. Five, five, four or five, but I think five jets were shot down actually,” Trump said, referring to the brief but intense military exchange between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
The claim, while lacking in detail, brought back focus on Operation Sindoor, India’s retaliatory military operation launched in early May following the deadly terror attack on April 22 in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam. The attack killed 26 people, including tourists, prompting air and missile strikes that escalated over a four-day period.
Pakistan has consistently claimed that its air force downed Indian jets during the engagement, including three French-built Rafale fighters, and that it had captured Indian pilots. Islamabad has not provided any evidence to substantiate these claims.
India, in contrast, has largely refrained from detailing its losses. However, in the weeks following the ceasefire, Indian Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan acknowledged that the Indian Air Force (IAF) did lose aircraft but dismissed the Pakistani narrative of six Indian jets being destroyed.
“What is important is that, not the jet being down, but why they were being down,” General Chauhan told Bloomberg TV at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in May. “Numbers are not important.”
General Chauhan then went on to describe India’s ability to quickly adapt tactics, learning from early errors, and launching successful subsequent waves of long-range precision strikes deep inside Pakistani territory.
“We were able to do precision strikes on heavily air-defended airfields of Pakistan deep 300 kilometres inside, with the precision of a metre,” he said.
India has consistently said that no Rafale fighters were lost, and denied any Indian pilots were captured or detained.
On June 15, Eric Trappier, Chairman and CEO of Dassault Aviation, the French manufacturer of the Rafale, called Pakistan’s claims “factually incorrect.”
“What Pakistan is claiming about downing three Rafales is simply not true,” Mr Trappier said in an interview with French magazine Challenges. “What we already know is that what the Pakistanis are saying about destroying three Rafale planes is inaccurate. When the complete details are known, the reality may surprise many.”
Trump reiterated that the ceasefire, announced on May 10, was the result of US diplomatic intervention, although India has consistently pushed back on that narrative.
“We stopped a lot of wars. And these were serious, India and Pakistan, that was going on. These are two serious nuclear countries, and they were hitting each other. You know, it seems like a new form of warfare. You saw it recently when you looked at what we did in Iran, where we knocked out their nuclear capability, totally knocked out that… But India and Pakistan were going at it, and they were back and forth, and it was getting bigger and bigger, and we got it solved through trade. We said, you guys want to make a trade deal. We’re not making a trade deal if you’re going to be throwing around weapons, and maybe nuclear weapons, both very powerful nuclear states,” the US President claimed.
India has disputed Trump’s version of events. Its official position is that New Delhi and Islamabad resolved the crisis bilaterally and that no foreign mediator played a decisive role. Indian officials have also rejected the idea that the US threatened to suspend trade talks to secure peace.
