“One year of Operation Sindoor: When India changed the rules of war”, First Post, May 07, 2026
“A year back, a group of Pakistan-backed terrorists walked into Baisaran meadow near Pahalgam, asked tourists their religion, and murdered them at point-blank range. Twenty-six people died. The attack was not random. It was designed to fracture India from within, to reignite communal fault lines, and to hide behind the familiar architecture of deniability that Pakistan’s military establishment had perfected over decades.
What followed was not what the planners in Rawalpindi anticipated. India’s response, Operation Sindoor, became one of the most precisely executed, technologically sophisticated, and strategically coherent military operations in the country’s post-Independence history. One year later, it is worth examining what actually happened, what it revealed about how far India has come, and what it demands of us going forward.
The operation lasted 88 hours. In that window, India struck nine high-value terror targets across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, hit eleven Pakistani airbases in a single night, neutralised hundreds of incoming drones and missiles without a single one reaching its intended target, dominated the Arabian Sea, and brought an adversary to a ceasefire on Indian terms. It did this not with imported platforms alone, but with a growing arsenal of weapons, sensors, and systems conceived, developed, and built in India. The story of Operation Sindoor is inseparable from the story of what a decade of determined defence indigenisation looks like when it meets the test of actual combat……”
Read full article at firstpost.com
