Operation Sindoor Proves Dharmic Wars Can Be Fought Even In Our Times

News18

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India, through Operation Sindoor, has taught the world how to conduct a 'limited military operation' without unjustifiable collateral casualties and extended warfare
It is anybody's guess why Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Gen Anil Chauhan chose an overseas venue, Singapore, and two foreign journalists/news agencies, Reuters and Bloomberg, to reiterate his earlier acknowledgement of possible losses of air assets in Operation Sindoor. Of course, he had said almost as much at Savitribai Phule University in Pune earlier.
Yet, the question remains why the CDS, or a political administrator, say, Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Defence Minister Rajnath Singh could not have said the same things, that too at a news conference in the national capital. After all, these preferred foreign news sources would have been represented by their Delhi-based correspondents, and others, mainly our own journalists, too would have benefited from an open interaction of the kind.
The question however is where from here, how and for what. Yes, India set a kind of precedent on neutralising an adversary militarily without having to violate international borders directly. We also did it within a matter of days, which is not the case even with Israel's bombing out of a small parcel of land in Gaza, continually for months and months now.
India showed to the world how to fight a modern war and win. During the Bangladesh War, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave Army chief Gen Sam Manekshaw three weeks to conclude the mission before international pressure caused a ceasefire. This time, too, the political leadership seemed to have taken into account the time-lines before a ceasefire became unavoidable.
It's thus not about whether US President Donald Trump caused the ceasefire, as he only claimed. Instead, it is as much about the clear-cut political instructions that seem to have gone down the line, on the modalities and methodologies of warfare as it was about how and how fast our armed forces achieved the set goals and objectives.
This aspect of Operation Sindoor has not been adequately acknowledged. What more, it is becoming increasingly clear that the operation would not have crossed into the second day after the Indian forces had neutralised terror sites in Pakistan and PoK. It is not unlikely that after the previous Surgical Strikes, a one-dayer of the kind would not have been appreciated as much by the public in this country as they did after the four-day military engagement.
What has stood out since is that Operation Sindoor was as much a surgical strike as the previous ones. Only selected targets were bombed. Even Pakistan has not claimed collateral damage, especially in the form of loss of human lives from around the targeted sites.
To that extent, too, India has proved that we were waging a 'dharmic war' with minimum war and maximum loss to the adversary's military capabilities—and nothing else. Compare it to the US war on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Ukraine War and Israel's Gaza strikes, and the picture will be complete. All these wars are in the post-Cold War. In the pre-Cold War period, you had the Vietnam War, which was a standing proof of how wars should not be fought—but ended up being fought, when Big Powers engaged in muscle-flexing at the expense of their poor cousins, far away from their borders.
In a way, Operation Sindoor might have ended on day one had Pakistan not escalated the military engagement, to target Indian military targets and civilian settlements, too. It was unwanted and unwarranted, if and only if their command and political leadership had assessed the damage and accepted that the Indian shelling had stopped with terror targets. Suffice to point out that to this day, Islamabad or Rawalpindi, respectively the seat of political and military power, has not claimed that any or all of the day one targets of Operation Sindoor were not terror bases but were civilian habitations.
By extending and expanding the scope of their adversary's operations, Pakistani military command commenced a war of attrition, which it lost out conclusively. In cross-border military strikes without IAF fighters crossing the International Border (IB) into Pakistan, India taught a lesson that will be remembered in post-Cold War global history of warfare.
In doing so, the world may not want to classify Operation Sindoor as a 'classic war'. It would then be only to India's political advantage on the global theatre. What more, such constructs do not alter the ground reality one wee bit: Pakistan involved India in a military engagement, and lost squarely.
Now, one needs to look at the truthfulness or otherwise of India's early claims that it was only a limited operation, confined to neutralising Pakistani terror-sites, and nothing more. Imagine a situation if Pakistan had not attacked India militarily from day two on. India would not have had a justifiable political reason to neutralise Pakistan's radar stations and air defences, without actually causing loss of their fighter aircraft.
Given the way India chose the targets, both for day one and later on, and the way Indian forces carried out their assigned mission, it is becoming increasingly convincing that if they had taken aim at Pakistani air bases and their fighter aircraft in numbers, they would have also gone up, 'boom'. This would also go to prove the Indian claim of a limited, targeted operation, and not a full-fledged war (unless imposed on it by the other side).
Nuclear bogey
It is also now clear from the Kargil War on, how India has been able to keep military operations against Pakistan at the conventional level. Western governments and media hype up every India-Pakistan military operation to a nuclear war, making it as if the two South Asian adversarial neighbours are incapable of fighting a 'responsible war'.
Operation Sindoor has proved India's proven path of peaceful coexistence and limited adversity in times of pressing needs. After all, this is one country in the world that at one point of time was a big power—and aspires to be one, again, any time soon—and still did not capture or retail territories. If there were limited engagements, there were justifiable reasons.
The government also thought on its feet, and sending out political delegations the world over for briefing local governments about the compulsions that caused Operation Sindoor, and the conclusions that justified the same post facto, was also a top scorer like the political messaging and military operations. To have Opposition parliamentarians like Shashi Tharoor and Assadudin Owaisi to lead some of those teams clearly showed how united India was in times of war as much in times of peace.
India, through Operation Sindoor, has taught the world how to conduct a 'limited military operation' without unjustifiable collateral casualties and extended warfare that anyway are destructive—as the world has seen in the post-Cold War era. But then wars are big business, and who else wants a short war!
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.
Location :
New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
June 09, 2025, 17:55 IST
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