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India faced 3 adversaries inOp Sindoor: Top general

NEW DELHI: India faced not one but three adversaries during the four-day military confrontation with Pakistan under Operation Sindoor two months ago, a top general said on Friday, putting the spotlight on the crucial battle support provided to Islamabad by allies Beijing and Ankara, and the lessons learnt from the May 7-10 clash. Beijing saw the confrontation as a "live lab" to test the performance of the weapons and systems supplied by it to Pakistan, and the Chinese actions reflected its strategy against India of "killing with a borrowed knife" (using Pakistan for its own gains), said Lieutenant General Rahul R Singh, deputy chief of army staff (capability development and sustenance). China also gave real-time inputs to Pakistan about India's weapon deployments, he said. Singh also explained why Pakistan asked for a ceasefire. "Because there was a punch that was ready, and they realised that the hidden punch, in case it comes through, Pakistan would be in a very, very bad condition." He was likely referring to the current leadership's muscular response to terror strikes. Previously, the understanding was that Pakistan sued for peace after Indian strikes on several of its military and air bases on the morning of May 10, but it was always suspected that New Delhi had a larger strike in the works, perhaps with the Indian Navy also getting involved. Singh's comment is the first official acknowledgement of that. "So few lessons that I thought I must flag as far as Operation Sindoor is concerned --- firstly, one border, two adversaries. So we saw Pakistan on one side, but adversaries were two. And I would say actually three. Pakistan was the front face. We had China providing all possible support... Turkey also played a very important role in providing the type of support that was there," said Singh at a conference on New Age Military Technologies organised by industry grouping FICCI. This is the first time that top levels of the Indian military have detailed the role of China and Turkey during the four-day military clash, the most intense conflict between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in decades. India launched Operation Sindoor in the early hours of May 7 and struck nine terror and military installations in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) as a response to the Pahalgam terror strike in which 26 people were shot dead by terrorists. It sparked a four-day military confrontation with Pakistan involving fighter jets, missiles, drones, long-range weapons and heavy artillery before the two sides reached an understanding on stopping all military action on May 10. "And it's (Chinese support) is no surprise because if you were to look at statistics in the last five years, 81% of the military hardware that Pakistan is getting is all Chinese. And China, of course, (used) the good old dictum 'kill by a borrowed knife'...So he would rather use the neighbour to cause pain, rather than getting involved in the mud-slinging match on the northern borders," Singh said, referring to the long-standing issue of an undefined border between India and China . Indian air defence systems and radars gathered considerable information on Chinese-origin equipment, particularly the J-10 and JF-17 fighter jets, PL-15 beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile and HQ-9 long-range air defence system. This was the first known use in combat for most of this equipment. Singh highlighted how China evaluated the performance of the weaponry supplied by it to Pakistan. "China, perhaps, has seen that he is able to test his weapons against, say, various other weapon systems that are there...It's like a live lab, which is available. That is something we have to be cognisant about," he said. Pakistan was getting real-time inputs from China about the positioning of Indian weapons during the clash, Singh said. "When the DGMO level talks were going on, Pakistan was actually mentioning that 'we know that your such and such important vector is primed and ready for action and I would request you to perhaps pull it back.' So he was getting live inputs from China." This is the first time that India has confirmed details of real-time coordination between Beijing and Islamabad. The Congress was quick to cite Singh's comments and demand a discussion on India-China relations in the Parliament. "Lt Gen Singh has revealed some details of the extraordinary ways by which China helped the Pakistan Air Force. This is the same China which completely destroyed the status quo in Ladakh five years ago but to which Prime Minister Modi gave a public clean chit on June 19, 2020. For five years, the INC has been demanding a discussion on the full gamut of India-China relations in the Parliament. The Modi government has consistently refused to have such a debate," said Congress MP Jairam Ramesh, who is also the party's general secretary in-charge communications. The Congress will continue to make this demand in the forthcoming monsoon session of Parliament, and the government must agree so that a consensus can be built for a collective response to the geopolitical and economic challenges that China poses to India --- directly and through Pakistan, Ramesh said. In his lecture, the army's deputy chief touched upon Turkey's role too, especially the drones supplied by it to Pakistan. "Bayraktar (drones), of course, he (Turkey) has been giving (to Pakistan) from before. We saw numerous other drones also coming in, landing in the face of war, during the war, along with trained sort of individuals who were there." India's population centres were not quite targeted by Pakistan during the skirmish but, in the next round, the country must be prepared for that, Singh said. "For that, more and more air defence, more and more counter rocket artillery, drone sort of a system has to be prepared for which we have to move very fast," he said. The defining thing about Operation Sindoor was that the strategic messaging by the country's leadership was unambiguous, he said. "You cross the redlines and there will be action. There would be punitive action if required. There is no scope of absorbing the pain the way we did a few years ago," he said, likely a reference to terror strikes in the past to which India did not respond militarily. India has now made it explicit that any sub-conventional attack (such as a terror strike) will be responded through conventionally (a military strike). He said stopping the war at the appropriate time was a masterstroke by India. "An important consideration was that we should always be on top of the escalation ladder. When we reach a political military objective, we should try and put a stop to it. So a lot of naysayers say, why did we stop now? So war is easy to initiate, but it's very difficult to control. I would say that was a masterstroke to stop the war."

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