Foreign secretary Vikram Misri was non-committal on Thursday whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi would meet either US presidential candidate during his three-day visit to America next week, two days after Donald Trump claimed the Indian leader planned to meet him.

Addressing a campaign rally in Michigan on Tuesday, Trump had said: “He (Modi) happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he’s fantastic. I mean, fantastic man. A lot of these leaders are fantastic.”

Asked whether the Prime Minister would be meeting Trump during his US visit, Misri neither confirmed nor rejected the possibility. He said several meetings were being arranged in the time available.

Modi will be in the US for the sixth Quad leaders’ summit in Wilmington, Delaware, and the Summit of the Future at the United Nations.

With several world leaders scheduled to be at the UN, bilateral meetings are being pencilled in. But Misri confirmed bilaterals only with the Quad partners — US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Australian Premier Anthony Albanese.

“This is work in progress; lots of moving parts. As and when the meetings are fixed up we will update you,” Misri said.

This was his stock response to the several questions asked on the subject, with Trump’s claim having brought into sharp recall his presence at the Howdy Modi event organised by the Indian diaspora for the Prime Minister in Houston in 2019. At that time, the process for the US presidential elections had already begun.

This was followed up by the Namaste Trump event in Ahmedabad a few months later when Modi rolled out the red carpet for the then US President in February 2020.

Officials suggested that a meeting between Modi and Trump was unlikely given their tight schedules.

Asked why Trump would make such a claim in public, the officials did not rule out an attempt by the American to reach out to the sizable Indian community in Michigan, keeping in mind the Indian antecedents of his Democratic opponent, Vice-President Kamala Harris.