Quick Take
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Air Chief Marshal AP Singh met Prime Minister Modi amid rising tensions.
The meeting follows PM’s discussions with military leaders over recent terror.
A deadly attack on April 22 killed 26 civilians, mostly tourists, In Pahalgam.
New Delhi:
Air Chief Marshal AP Singh today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi amid escalating tensions between India and Pakistan over the Pahalgam terror attack, which killed 26 people on April 22, sources said. The engagement with the Air Force chief came less than 24 hours after a separate meeting between the Prime Minister and Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi, the Chief of the Naval Staff. The Prime Minister had met Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi last week.
While an official readout of the meeting was not released to the media, it is being seen as part of ongoing deliberations over a response to the April 22 attack, in which gunmen opened fire on a group of tourists in Pahalgam.
All those killed were civilians, many of them tourists from various states across India, visiting the picturesque region in south Kashmir during the spring season. The attack marked one of the deadliest strikes on civilians in Kashmir in recent years and has triggered calls for retributive action against Pakistan, which India accuses of providing support to terror groups to carry out cross-border attacks.
Prime Minister Modi, in a high-level meeting held earlier this week, gave clear directions to the defence leadership that the Indian armed forces have “complete operational freedom” to decide the nature, targets, and timing of the country’s response to the attack. Present at that earlier meeting were Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan, and the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Two days after the Pahalgam massacre, PM Modi’s reference to taking the fight to the “ends of the earth” and punishing the perpetrators “beyond their imagination” was widely seen as a direct message to Pakistan.
Historically, India has responded to terrorist provocations with force. In 2016, India carried out surgical strikes on terrorist launchpads across the Line of Control, following the attack on soldiers in J&K’s Uri, and the 2019 Balakot airstrikes after the Pulwama bombing.
The Air Force played a key role in the Balakot operation, using Mirage-2000 fighter jets to carry out strikes on what the government described as a major terror training facility.
Following the Pahalgam attack, India has already taken diplomatic and strategic steps aimed at increasing pressure on Islamabad. One such move was the decision to put in abeyance certain provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty, a longstanding bilateral agreement governing the use of rivers that flow from India into Pakistan.
Despite public pressure and the firm tone adopted by the Prime Minister and senior officials, there has so far been no official word on the nature or timing of any retaliatory action.
