Pakistan has been having a poor reputation for not only acting as a terror factory but also for spreading lies and making tall claims, all of which obviously are typical of a weak nation and a cloistered mindset. Pakistan had not accepted defeat in previous wars with India; it had claimed to have inflicted huge casualties on this side while mischievously downplaying its losses. Ditto, this time. Social media is awash with fabricated news about Pakistan’s bravado in last week’s military engagement it had with India. In no war would we get to know the whole information. We will, in part, be in a make-believe world. So were the situations involving India in the past and this time, too. Yet, from what we got to know, the Indian military systems did a valiant job in the four days of intense action, our missiles ripping through Pakistan’s air defences and doing precision strikes across regions, reaching up again to the military headquarter town of Rawalpindi. The way India targeted and decimated terror fountainhead Masood Azhar’s base, killing over ten of his kith and kin including his sister, showed the vulnerability of the place. No one can feel safe there any longer.
It was significant that Prime Minister Narendra Modi went up to the Adampur Air Base on Tuesday and posed for pictures with an S400 system in the backdrop. Among other unsubstantiated claims, this was one that Pakistan claimed it destroyed. Developed by Russia, the S400 systems remain a star attraction, the hero of all heroes, alongside Akash in the just-suspended military engagement in the subcontinent. Hailed as the “most-advanced surface to air missile systems, these units located along the vulnerable border states have a range of 400km and a threat-detection capability of up to 600 km. Aptly named Sudarshan Chakras, signifying divine protection, these can target aircrafts and even cruise and ballistic missiles in the air. The system’s strength is also evident in the fact that these can track up to 100 targets at a time. The presence of these systems was why Pakistan could not enter India’s airspace all through the present engagement, other than through the hundreds of drones, which too could not inflict any significant harm.
While no confirmation is available, a general perception is that India lost one Rafale fighter jet, which was downed perhaps by China’s J-10C, both being the 4.5-generation systems. The Indian Army has neither confirmed nor denied this. Prime Minister Modi has warned that the Pakistani government, its military and its terrorist modules would be equally targeted in a coordinated manner hereafter, as Operation Sindoor is the “new normal.” This sends out the right signals to Pakistan. Hopes are that, having learned a bitter lesson, both the military and political leaderships out there would act with restraint hereafter. Some 100 terrorists have been killed in the present operations, as India claims, but notably the gang of terrorists that staged the bloody mayhem in Pahalgam remains untraced.
