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India’s ‘Operation Sindoor’ strikes raise serious questions

While India claims it destroyed terror targets in Pakistan and avenged the Pahalgam terror attacks, the overall goals of 'Operation Sindoor' raise questions.

  • AuthorPosted byTanmoy Ibrahim
  • Published
  • Updated1.03 am
Posted by Tanmoy Ibrahim on May 8, 2025. Updated: 1.03 am
Did 'Operation Sindoor' end the terror infrastructure in Pakistan? Why does India's anti-terror strategy fall short of achieving its goals?

Image credit: Indian Ministry of Defence

At the early hours of May 7th, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced that it had conducted military strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) and the international border under “Operation Sindoor”, targeting terrorists hiding in Pakistan-controlled Jammu & Kashmir and Pakistani Punjab province. 

Pakistan has acknowledged the Indian strikes that have reportedly killed over 31 civilians and wounded around 57. 

India’s mainstream media claims a much larger toll.

Mr Modi’s government claims the “Operation Sindoor” was launched to avenge the killing of 26 civilians in the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22nd.

India’s French Rafale fighters reportedly carried out the strikes using high-precision Scalp missiles, with a range of 300km, and Hammer glide bombs.

While India claims that the strikes were precisely done, targeting Pakistan-based terror infrastructure, Islamabad has alleged that the strikes have killed civilians and destroyed mosques.

Pakistani shelling across the LoC across Jammu & Kashmir has killed nearly 15 and wounded over 25, foreign press reports.

While India’s state-aligned mainstream media has been amplifying the government’s claims around “Operation Sindoor”, and the Opposition, including the left, supports Mr Modi, there are many questions related to the Indian strike that raise questions regarding its efficacy.

Operation Sindoor: Targets and purpose

In a statement, India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has claimed, “Our actions have been focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature. No Pakistani military facilities have been targeted. India has demonstrated considerable restraint in selection of targets and method of execution (sic).”

India has claimed that Operation Sindoor was well-planned and a precision strike. 

However, Pakistan and international news agencies, including Reuters, have claimed civilian victims, including ten family members of Jaish-e-Mohammad founder Masood Azhar, who was released from Indian captivity in exchange for a hijacked Indian plane’s passengers in 1999.

According to Reuters, the Indian attacks had badly damaged a mosque-seminary in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. It also reported that five Indian missiles had killed three people in the two-storey structure, which also had residential quarters, quoting locals.

By claiming that India’s Operation Sindoor has not hit any Pakistani military targets, fearing escalation, and using the term “restraint” used last year by Iran when it attacked Israel, India has tried to take a middle course amid geopolitical volatility.

While Indian state-aligned media and Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters have been cheering the attacks and calling them a befitting reply to the alleged Pakistan-sponsored terror attack in Pahalgam, Islamabad has accused India of attacking civilians, including women and children, through these strikes.

“The targets we had set were destroyed with exactness according to a well-planned strategy,” India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said. 

“We have shown sensitivity by ensuring that no civilian population was affected in the slightest,” Mr Singh asserted.

However, Pakistan refutes the claim and blames India for killing civilians.

Islamabad has reportedly sent local and foreign journalists stationed in Pakistan to the locations hit by India to show them the real damage. 

This act by Pakistan is unique, as during the controversial 2019 surgical strike in Balakot, Islamabad had denied any casualties on its end and had alleged that Indian strikes had hit a few trees and killed a crow.

Pakistan’s acceptance of the damage and insistence on pushing journalists to the spot indicate that the military authorities are certain that Indian strikes have killed civilians.

While there remains a controversy over the targets of Indian attacks, the purpose of the attack raises questions.

Alike the 2019 Balakot surgical strikes, India has claimed it has attacked terrorist infrastructure and asked Pakistan to desist from supporting terrorism. 

However, India’s approach of fighting terrorism by merely hitting suspicious terror targets in Pakistan has proven futile, as it failed to stop the bloodshed after the Balakot strikes.

While Mr Modi has taken pride in election rallies to claim that his BJP-led government has ended terrorism in Kashmir, in reality, violence continues in the valley, and both Islamist extremists backed by Pakistan and Indian soldiers continue to lose lives.

In this scenario, it has become important to review India’s anti-terror policy.

India’s Jammu & Kashmir has been suffering due to militancy backed by the Pakistani Army. 

The Islamic Republic’s military establishment in Rawalpindi has been relying on “Mujahideens” or Islamist extremists to carry out a proxy war against India since the end of the Soviet-Afghan War in 1989.

While India has been constantly fighting and killing militants backed by Pakistani Army in Jammu & Kashmir with the help of a three-decade-long counter-insurgency operation—laced with controversy and New Delhi has been accused of gross human rights violations—it has not fought the Pakistani Army directly after the 1971 war, except for a brief border conflict in Kargil in 1999. 

As the Islamist extremists are constantly sourced from rural Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, with the help of indoctrination or monetary incentives. 

These extremists are provided rudimentary training by the Pakistani Army and then pushed into India-controlled Jammu & Kashmir from the Pakistan-occupied side. 

While these extremists carry out operations against the Indian Army and paramilitary forces, whom Pakistan and local separatists call “occupiers” and “colonisers”, India’s retaliation has never hit the fountainhead of the militants—the Pakistani Army.

For India, fighting the Islamist extremists funded by Pakistan is a costly exercise.

India loses its soldiers in fighting the militants who arrive in the country with the intent to die.

They have no umbilical cords connecting them to the Pakistani Army.

Thus, while India loses its soldiers, Pakistan merely loses men it denies calling its own.

Yet, Indian soldiers miss the chance of ending the vicious cycle of terror through decisive actions against the Pakistani Army, which New Delhi won’t endorse.

In this equation, even though New Delhi claims that Operation Sindoor has hit nine “terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir from where terrorist attacks against India have been planned and directed”, it will not break the spinal chord of Pakistan-sponsored Islamic terrorism as the attacks spared Pakistani military establishment and didn’t cause any harm to its ability in promoting and sponsoring terrorism.

Without hitting the Pakistani military establishment, it seems India has limited its response to mere tokenism without any long-term security guarantee.

Retaliation and escalation

While Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has vowed to avenge the attack. The Pakistani shelling has targeted border posts of the Indian Army and civilians.

Media reports claim that by the night of Wednesday, several civilian homes and a school in Jammu, a Gurdwara in Indian Punjab, have been hit by Pakistani shelling.

Press in Pakistan have reported that counterattacks have destroyed five Indian jets.

While the Indian MoD has denied the reports that any of its fighter planes, including the much-hyped French Rafale jets, have come under Pakistani fire, Reuters reported that locals reported three Indian fighters crashing across the Himalayan region in the wee hours of Wednesday.

In an independent assessment, the British state-controlled BBC has also supported the Pakistani claim. Although India’s The Hindu had reported the incident, it later withdrew the story from its website, raising doubts about the fate of the Indian fighters.

Similarly, American state media CNN has claimed that a top French intelligence official has acknowledged that India lost a Rafale jet on May 7th.

As the neighbours engage in cross-border shelling, India runs a mock drill to check administrative preparedness, Islamabad is left with two choices.

On the one hand, it can try to launch an attack on India to appease the Pakistani people angry at the government over its meek approach and detention of Imran Khan, the former prime minister; on the other, it can seek international support for de-escalation.

At a time when Pakistan suffers from an economic crisis caused by International Monetary Fund debts, it’s hard for it to afford a war with India, which has double the military strength.

Facing this reality, Pakistan wants to engage India in conflict as well as use diplomatic means to de-escalate.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told Bloomberg in an interview, “We’ve been saying it on and on in the last fortnight that we never initiated anything hostile towards India. But if they attack, we will respond. If India backs down, we will definitely wrap up these tensions.”

As Islamabad takes a careful approach, it seems that it will still opt for a limited conventional conflict to create optics like Mr Modi to deliver a message to the electors at home rather than to the enemy.

The compulsion on both sides to create optics and appease the electorate will continue to drag the conflict following India’s “Operation Sindoor” for long and impact the regional peace and stability.

Tanmoy Ibrahim is a journalist who writes extensively on geopolitics and political economy. During his two-decade-long career, he has written extensively on the economic aspects behind the rise of the ultra-right forces and communalism in India. A life-long student of the dynamic praxis of geopolitics, he emphasises the need for a multipolar world with multilateral ties for a peaceful future for all.

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