Op Sindoor: Paradigm shift from candle lights to BrahMos

The horrible picture of Himanshi Narwal, married just a week back, sitting alone by the side of the dead body of her husband with his head smashed by a point-blank gunshot of Islamic terrorists at Pahalgam on April 22, went viral on the national and global media.

- S GURUMURTHY Editor, Thuglak Tamil Magazine. Chairman, Vivekananda International Foundation Strategic Think Tank

That unforgettable scene and the unforgivable crime became the theme and symbol for Operation Sindoor, the code for Indian military action against the Islamic terror camps in Pakistan. Ironically, it is an anti-India, anti-Hindu New York Times [May 7] that saw Himanshi as the Indian feminine cultural symbol of Operation Sindoor.

Nine days later, in a blood donation camp on her slain husband's birthday, Himanshi demanded the perpetrators of the Pahalgam carnage be brought to book. That was how the sindoor that the Pahalgam terrorists wiped out from her and 25 other women's foreheads became the spilled sindoor sign in the Op Sindoor code, and the emotive symbol of the national mission to avenge the dastardly crime against Indian women. Indian defence forces executed the mission with such precision and perfection that even the Israelis famous for such actions would learn and benefit from our intelligence and military professionals.

Pakistan as terrorist state Op Sindoor, which will figure in military history as the most spectacular anti-terror operation anywhere in the world, daring a nuclear power which threatens to press its nuclear button at will, cannot be rivalled even by Israel, the master terror-buster. The reason is simple. Israel faces no nuclear threat. Op Sindoor is also the high vantage point of rising India's war on the terror state of Pakistan, from where the Modi India binned and buried the most dangerous and anti-Indian, anti-human narrative of the Sonia-Manmohan-led India that "Pakistan is not a purveyor of terror but a victim of it."