INDIA-PAKISTAN WAR!

PAKISTAN’S DANGEROUS GAMBIT AND HOW WE MATCHUP

- RAJ CHENGAPPA and PRADIP R. SAGAR

Retribution, like justice, must not only be delivered but also seen to be delivered. The Indian Army learned this lesson the hard way in 2019, when it offered only limited photographic evidence of its air strikes on terror camps in Balakot in Pakistan, launched in response to the Pulwama attack. Pakistan denied any damage, and international scepticism about the operation's success persisted. Six years later, on May 7, the Indian armed forces ensured there was no such ambiguity. In a bold response to the April 22 Pahalgam carnage, they struck nine terror installations across Pakistan and released vivid video and photographic proof of what the operation accomplished.

Operation Sindoor, as the strike was branded, was as much a military retaliation as a symbolic gesture, evident in its name and logo-vermillion powder, a marker of a married woman's status in the Hindu tradition, spilling from the 'o's in 'sindoor. It was a poignant reference to the women who were widowed when terrorists ruthlessly gunned down 26 innocent men in the Baisaran meadow of Pahalgam.

India was avenging their loss, as it were. The Modi government further reinforced the Nari Shakti (women's empowerment) narrative when it got two women officers from the armed forces to brief the press on the operation.