Op Sindoor: Paradigm shift from candle lights to BrahMos
The horrible image of Himanshi Narwal—married just a week earlier—sitting alone beside the lifeless body of her husband, whose head had been smashed by a point-blank gunshot fired by Islamic terrorists in Pahalgam on April 22, went viral across national and international media. That unforgettable scene, and the unforgivable crime behind it, became the central theme and symbol of Operation Sindoor—the codename for the Indian military action against Islamic terror camps in Pakistan. Ironically, it was the often anti-India, anti-Hindu New York Times (May 7) that portrayed Himanshi as the embodiment of Indian feminine cultural strength, representing Operation Sindoor.
Nine days later, at a blood donation camp held on her slain husband's birthday, Himanshi demanded that the perpetrators of the Pahalgam massacre be brought to justice. The sindoor that was cruelly wiped from her forehead—and from the foreheads of 25 other women—became the spilled symbol of Operation Sindoor and a powerful, emotional representation of the national mission to avenge the heinous crime against Indian women.
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-led 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.”
The shameful endorsement of the terror state of Pakistan as a victim of terror needs to be recalled and its authors shamed, as Op Sindoor finally proved it is a terror state. Pakistani generals stood in reverence and paid homage to the most wanted terrorists killed in the operation.
In 2011, Pakistan stood naked before the world as a global terror merchant, as the US commandos chasing the 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden — who massacred over 4,000 men and women — found him in Abbottabad in Pakistan, well protected by the Pakistan military.
Op Sindoor is also the high vantage point of rising India’s war on the terror state of Pakistan, from where Modi-led India binned and buried the most dangerous and anti-Indian narrative of the Sonia-Manmohan-led India — that “Pakistan is not a purveyor of terror but a victim of it.”
And yet, India under the Congress-led coalition government was busy probing and proving Hindu terror! Until Modi arrived on the scene in 2014 and began to unravel that Pakistan itself is a terrorist state, two generations of Indians were fed on the narrative that friendship with Pakistan was the best way for both to fight terror — when it really meant shaking hands with the terrorist!
Pakistan is not run by government or law. It is driven by a huge terror architecture.
State, army, intelligence, $30 billion—backed terror
Before Op Sindoor is unravelled, the story of how Pakistan’s terror infrastructure was built — beginning from the time of General Zia-ul-Haq, when the country adopted jihad as state policy — needs to be told. The Pakistani state, army, and intelligence agencies converged to create and sustain a massive global-level terror infrastructure: first backed by the West against Russia in the 1980s, and later used for a covert war against India.
A well-known quip in diplomatic circles goes: “Every nation has an army, but Pakistan’s army has a nation.” This aptly describes the deep-rooted control of the Pakistan army over the country. Seen as a national icon by its people, the Pakistan army dominates not just the polity but also controls the economy and stock market. The Fauji Foundation (often referred to as the "Soldiers Foundation"), managed and owned by the Pakistan army, is a vast conglomerate covering industries like fertilizer, cement, food, retail, power generation, gas exploration, LPG distribution, and financial services. It provides "womb-to-tomb" benefits to retired servicemen and their families (Balfour, Frederik. “Pakistan: Armed Forces Inc”. Bloomberg, 11 Nov 2001).
According to Professor R. Vaidyanathan of IIM Bangalore (Pakistan: Army with a Country, 2011), the Soldiers Foundation holds a staggering 70% share of Pakistan’s stock market capitalisation. With Pakistan’s current market cap at around $43 billion, this implies that the army controls nearly $30 billion in liquid assets.
It is with these massive resources that the Pakistan army — which has not won any of the four wars it has fought with India — and its intelligence wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), built thousands of madrasas to radicalize millions of youth. From this radicalized base, the state, army, and intelligence agencies created and supported terror outfits like Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM). Later, groups like The Resistance Front (TRF) and many other jihadist organizations were formed to recruit unemployed youth to wage a covert war on India, all under the army’s doctrine of “bleeding India with a thousand cuts.”
These terror outfits operate out of luxurious mansions protected by the army. From there, jihadists infiltrate India with army cover, carry out attacks, and escape with impunity. Even though the state that protects them behaves like a sovereign nation, it is effectively a fraudulent legal sovereign. India, the victim of this cross-border terrorism, cannot strike back directly without being accused of violating Pakistan’s so-called sovereignty — even though it is clearly a jihadi state.
From candle lights ….
Since the 1990s, India has been suffering silently or crying loudly about terror attacks by jihadi outfits operating from inside Pakistan, killing tens of thousands of people. With the Indian state ruled by fragile and weak coalitions from 1989 to 2014, Pakistani terrorists not only operated freely, but Pakistan also had the sympathy of the Indian state.
When, in 2008, Islamist terrorists—including Ajmal Kasab—sent by Pakistan slaughtered and maimed hundreds of innocents in Mumbai, an attack witnessed by the whole world on television, the Sonia-Manmohan-led Indian state fervently appealed for peace and harmony. They sponsored and led candlelight processions, even expressing empathy that poor Pakistan was also a victim of terror, effectively certifying the greatest terror merchant against India as innocent. They repeatedly claimed that terror has no religion and is secular. Yet paradoxically, they insisted that Hindu terror existed, with Rahul Gandhi warning the US that Hindu terror was more dangerous!
This was the narrative about terror in India when Narendra Modi led the BJP to win a majority on its own in 2014. With his image dented worldwide as a Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim, and with many countries denying him visas, Modi had to overcome this negative perception, especially regarding Pakistan.
He chose to attend Nawaz Sharif’s family wedding on December 25, 2015, following the example of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who traveled by bus in February 1999 to Lahore to befriend Pakistan. However, within three months of Vajpayee’s bus journey, in May 1999, Pakistan launched the Kargil war to stab him in the back.
Similarly, within seven days of Modi attending Sharif’s family wedding, on January 2, 2016, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) struck the Pathankot military base, killing seven army personnel and injuring 25 others. Modi realized that in Pakistan, neither the prime minister nor the government mattered; what mattered were the terror outfits as the extended arm of the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
To gun shots, aerial strikes
When the JeM terror group struck Uri and killed 19 Indian soldiers in September 2016, Modi ordered a surgical strike by the army. The forces crossed the Line of Control (LoC), entered Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), and killed around 70 terrorists. Modi reversed India’s response to terror from candlelight vigils to gunfire.
In 2019, he took this further. When JeM attacked Pulwama on February 14, killing 46 CRPF jawans, Modi ordered the Indian Air Force to cross the LoC and strike the JeM camp at Balakot, killing an estimated 250-300 jihadis. Modi upgraded India’s response from gunfights in 2016 to aerial bombing in 2019.
Pakistan called a meeting of its nuclear command group to threaten India in 2019, but Modi brushed it aside. India firmly declared that cross-border attacks were now part of its anti-terror strategy. Save for wailing and complaining, Pakistan could do nothing.
By the end of 2019, Article 370 was abrogated and thrown into the dustbin. Once again, Pakistan could only lament and shout. With surgical strikes and airstrikes hitting terror launchpads, coupled with stricter policing to clamp down on terror, Kashmir became peaceful and prosperous. Terror killings in Kashmir dropped dramatically from 86 in 2018 to just 12 in 2023. Elections were held in 2024, and despite opposing the repeal of Article 370, the Abdullah family became rulers in Kashmir without Article 370.
And finally brahMos
A humiliated Pakistan lost all its senses and struck through LeT’s proxy, The Resistance Front (TRF), at the unguarded tourist spot in Pahalgam. Worse, it killed tourists after checking their religion and confirming that, as mandated by Islamic theology—which governs Pakistan—they killed only Kafirs, that is, Hindus.
Modi knew that attacking terror bases in Pakistan would invite a war with a reckless Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons. Yet, he chose to initiate that conflict by openly directing the strikes on those terror bases — essentially declaring war and notifying Pakistan, “We are going to hit you.”
Their theology did not forbid them from killing in front of the victims’ wives and children. Yet they did that too. Modi vowed that India would chase these beastly terrorists, their backers, and funders to the ends of the earth and bury them in the soil — an open political directive to the Indian defence, intelligence, and diplomatic community. It needed no political pundit to deduce that the Prime Minister’s direction was to strike terrorist camps in Pakistan.
The heart-rending terror left no option for the political system and leadership but to declare an open war against terror. However, this was unlike the US-led war on terror, which targeted a state — the invasion of Afghanistan. India’s war on terror was not, and could not be, an open war against the state of Pakistan. Yet, technically, any attack on terror camps in Pakistan, which are extensions of the state and army, was in effect an attack on Pakistan itself.
Modi knew that attacking these terror bases would invite war with a mad Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons. Yet he chose to initiate that war by openly directing strikes on terror bases — essentially declaring war and notifying Pakistan, “We are going to hit you.” Executing such an openly declared mission, which deprived the Indian army of the surprise element crucial for success, was indeed a daunting challenge, as the enemy would be fully prepared to thwart it. Moreover, since it was a declared cross-border attack, it required not only military preparation but also extremely skillful diplomatic maneuvering to secure support from major world powers and minimize opposition.
Within 15 days of the Pahalgam slaughter, Team Modi — comprising the tri-forces, intelligence, and diplomacy — spectacularly accomplished the explicitly declared mission by hitting nine terror bases in Pakistan and killing over 100 jihadis. This time, it was no mere gunshot as in PoK, no aerial bombing as in Balakot. Modi upgraded the Indian response to barbaric Pakistani terror to another level — BrahMos missiles.
How could Modi transform an anti-terror mission, previously kept secret to maintain surprise attacks on terror camps in PoK in 2016 and Balakot in 2019, into an open and notified mission in 2025 and still succeed? His preparations for 2025 began right after Balakot in 2019, when he realized that a completely new non-contact war model was needed — one targeting not just terror but its sponsor, Pakistan.
The next part is about how the Indian army, air force, and navy masterfully and professionally executed that openly declared mission against terror and how they even excelled Israel in an Israel-model attack.