One year of Operation Sindoor: How India crippled terror to avenge Pahalgam killings

E-PaperSubscribeSubscribeEnjoy unlimited accessSubscribe Now! Get features like India’s secret war in the skies over Pakistan last summer was neither the nuclear cliff-hanger Washington now likes to project, nor the limited “surgical” exchange Islamabad claims it won on social media. It was a calibrated, hard‑hitting campaign - codenamed Operation Sindoor - designed to punish Pakistan‑backed terror without slipping into an all‑out war, and it left the Pakistan military scrambling to repair both concrete and credibility. The trigger, as Shishir Gupta recounts, was the April 22 terror massacre at the Baisaran Valley tourist destination near Pahalgam, where Pakistan‑backed terrorists segregated victims by religion and killed 26 people. India’s response was not symbolic: it was built around long‑range precision strikes on terror infrastructure deep inside Pakistan and Pakistan‑occupied Kashmir. On May 7, India opened its account with a BrahMos cruise missile strike on the Jaish‑e‑Mohammed headquarters at Bahawalpur, paired with a French SCALP air‑launched cruise missile. The BrahMos was fired from a Su‑30MKI, while the SCALP came off a Rafale, both staying within Indian airspace while delivering stand‑off blows across the border. The same night, Lashkar‑e‑Taiba’s Muridke headquarters was hit using SCALP and Israeli Crystal Maze missiles, while other terror camps were targeted with loitering munitions - Polish Warmate, Israeli PALM 200/400, Harop and Harpy. What began ostensibly as counter‑terror retaliation was, in effect, the opening phase of a limited air and missile war. The decisive punch came in the early hours of May 10. Around 1:30 am, India launched the first of a volley of BrahMos missiles at the Chaklala/Noor Khan air base in Rawalpindi, home to Pakistan’s Northern Air Command. According to Gupta, this strike crippled the command‑and‑control network, effectively leaving Pakistan’s northern air force “blind” and unable to see what was unfolding in its own skies. By noon that day, India had used BrahMos 11 times, hitting a string of air bases, with the last strikes falling on Jacobabad and Bhanoti/Bhunari. In parallel, India brought its S‑400 air defence systems into play, and by Gupta’s account, 11 Pakistani air bases had been significantly damaged, with aircraft and other aerial platforms destroyed on the ground and at least six to seven Pakistani planes lost. The scale and tempo of these operations, backed by heavy use of American Excalibur precision artillery in Pakistan‑occupied Kashmir, forced Pakistan to vacate up to 10 km in some forward areas due to the intensity of Indian fire. Against this backdrop, US President Donald Trump has publicly claimed credit for stopping a potential nuclear war between India and Pakistan by brokering a ceasefire. Gupta’s reconstruction of the decision‑making chain tells a very different story - one in which Washington was an anxious bystander, not a central mediator. On May 9, as tensions spiked and Pakistan prepared its “Operation Bunyan al‑Marsus”, US Vice‑President J.D. Vance phoned Prime Minister Narendra Modi, warning of a major Pakistani retaliation. Modi’s reported response, says Gupta, was blunt: India would answer a bullet with a bomb. The next morning, as BrahMos strikes unfolded, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried repeatedly to reach External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, who had just come out of the war room at 5 am and, as Gupta puts it, was “apparently sleeping”. When the call finally connected around 8:45–9 am, Jaishankar was categorical that any discussion on ceasefire would have to be routed through military‑to‑military channels - specifically, between the Directors General of Military Operations (DGMO) of India and Pakistan. It was Pakistan’s DGMO who called his Indian counterpart at about 3:35 pm that afternoon to propose a ceasefire, once it became evident that India had met its limited war aims. India accepted because its objectives - smashing key terror camps and degrading Pakistani air infrastructure - had been achieved; New Delhi was never seeking regime change or territorial gains. The diplomatic twist came in the narrow window between the DGMO agreement and its formal internal communication. According to Gupta, Jaishankar instructed Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri to inform the Army and other agencies of the ceasefire, but the Army took about two hours to ensure that all formations along the western front were properly briefed. Islamabad, meanwhile, rushed to tell Washington that India had agreed, and Trump, “the masterful tweeter”, woke up, tweeted the news and promptly claimed the credit. In Gupta’s telling, at no point did India ask the US to broker peace, and at no point did nuclear escalation feature in the actual chain of decisions. If the kinetic exchange tilted towards India, the information war played out differently. Pakistan and its backers, Gupta argues, moved quickly to manufacture a perception of victory - pushing images on May 7 and after as if Indian assets had been devastated. Among the claims was that India’s S‑400 system had been destroyed at Adampur and in Bhuj; those images, Gupta points out, were simply false, with the Prime Minister later visiting Adampur where the S‑400 remained intact. Gupta contrasts this with what he describes as India’s conservative, evidence‑based approach to information, in which New Delhi preferred to understate rather than over‑dramatise its gains. In a world “where perception is bigger than reality”, Pakistan, backed by China and often indulged by the US when the issue is India, pushed its narrative more aggressively into the global echo system. At the same time, neither the US nor China has publicly owned up to their own losses or system failures in recent conflicts, whether in the US‑Iran confrontation or the performance of Chinese‑origin radars and weapon systems in Pakistan, Iran or Venezuela. That silence, Gupta suggests, further tilts international scrutiny toward Indian claims and away from Pakistani vulnerabilities. If the decision to accept a ceasefire was military‑driven - because India had done what it set out to do - the political leadership in Delhi was far from satisfied with how Pakistan behaved afterwards. Despite agreeing to stop, Pakistani forces continued firing through the night of May 10, using drones, artillery and cross‑border shelling against targets in Jammu and Rajasthan. India, having formally accepted the ceasefire, chose not to respond in kind, adhering to its commitments even as the other side chipped away at them. This restraint, Gupta notes, angered parts of the political establishment, who felt India should have hit back when Pakistan repeatedly violated the very ceasefire it had requested. On the ground in Pakistan, the story since Operation Sindoor is one of reconstruction and renewed caution. Lashkar‑e‑Taiba’s Muridke headquarters and Jaish‑e‑Mohammed’s Markaz Subhanallah complex in Bahawalpur, both struck by Indian missiles, have seen visible construction activity as they try to rebuild what was destroyed. Other camps too, he says, are being restored; terror infrastructure targeting India remains “alive and kicking” because it is embedded in Pakistan’s state policy. The difference, Gupta underlines, is deterrence: there is now a clear expectation in Rawalpindi that any fresh attack on Indian civilians will invite a hard, cross‑border response - summed up in the doctrine of “ghar mein ghus ke maarenge”, hitting terrorists on their own soil. India, in his view, neither needs external permission to do this, nor can it realistically be stopped by outside powers once it decides. Operation Sindoor has also accelerated India’s military modernisation, particularly in long‑range and precision capabilities. In the year since the operation, India has contracted roughly ₹30,000 crore worth of drones and counter‑drone systems, strengthening both surveillance and kinetic options. New Delhi is preparing to issue a Letter of Request to Dassault for 114 Rafale fighters under a “Make in India” framework, expanding the very fleet that delivered SCALP strikes in May 2024. It has acquired the Israeli PULS rocket artillery system, with a 300‑km range, as a more economical complement to expensive missiles, and inducted large quantities of loitering ammunition such as Warmate 400. On the air‑defence and strike side, India has brought in long‑range surface‑to‑air Barak systems from Israel and is exploring longer‑range variants of BrahMos to extend its reach deeper into the subcontinent. At sea, it quietly launched its third nuclear‑powered ballistic missile submarine, INS Aridhaman, on April 3, with a fourth, INS Arisudan, slated for launch next year - consolidating a survivable second‑strike capability. Add to this a steady stream of howitzers, tanks and light armour, and Gupta’s central point becomes clear: India aims to maintain a decisive conventional edge over Pakistan, while signalling to all regional adversaries that any “evil eye” on India will invite a cost they cannot afford. In his closing remark to anchor Aayesha Varma, Gupta offers a quiet warning: Operation Sindoor, in his words, “is still not complete” - a reminder that for New Delhi, the campaign against cross‑border terror is not a one‑off revenge strike, but a long, unfinished project of deterrence by punishment. Author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (2011, Hachette) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (2014, Hachette). Awarded K Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 by Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) and the 2011 Ben Gurion Prize by Israel.Read More