Army Day Reckoning: Operation Sindoor And India’s New Pakistan Doctrine |
Twenty-six tourists were killed in Pahalgam on April 22 last year – most of them Hindus. The killers made a point of it. They separated the Hindu pilgrims, asked them their names, their religion and even pulled down the pants of the men. Then they shot mercilessly. This was not a random terror attack, but a message: Kashmir is not yours.
Pakistan’s military chief, Asim Munir, had delivered a speech days before. He called Kashmir Pakistan’s “jugular vein." He called the two-nation theory absolute truth. For a man in his position, such speeches are not idle words. They are permissions slips.
For three decades, this was the transaction: Pakistan would shelter terrorist groups, arm them, train them, send them across the border. When India protested, Pakistan would smile and deny everything. When India demanded accountability, Pakistan would shake its head and say, “Look at your nuclear weapons. Look at ours. We both know where this ends." And India would take the blow, express outrage, and wait for the next attack.
That arrangement is dead. Operation Sindoor killed it.
On the night of May 7, the Indian Air Force struck nine locations. Not launchpads at the line of control, neither low-hanging camps in the mountains. India bombed the nerve centres of Pakistan. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Muridke headquarters in Lahore. Jaish-e-Mohammad’s Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur.
In twenty-two minutes, the strikes were complete. What followed was not the usual postoperative argument about whether the strikes even happened. The Indian government declassified satellite imagery, video footage – leaving nothing to chance.
Then Pakistan did what it........