A former chief of defence staff’s porous account of Operation Sindoor exposes the risks of nuclear escalation

On 25 August 2026, Anil Chauhan, a retired military general, gave a lecture on Operation Sindoor and its aftermath at the Vivekananda International Foundation, a policy think tank associated with the Sangh. Chauhan had been the chief of defence staff during the military clash with Pakistan in May last year, and pretty much stated the official version of the operation, which the Narendra Modi government has tried to feed the public, both domestic and international. In this telling, it was a three-phase, largely non-contact military conflict that India won. Given what we know today, most neutral observers would not buy Chauhan’s claim of an Indian victory. There were critical—and predictable—gaps in this sanitised narrative.

For instance, by overlooking the confirmed loss of Indian fighter jets, downplaying real-time Chinese intelligence support to Islamabad, dismissing the impact of third-party mediation and blaming a specific weapon’s unpredictable performance for the strike on Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure at Kirana Hills, Chauhan ignores the volatile operational realities of the May 2025 conflict. Far from proving India’s ability to conduct conventional warfare under the nuclear shadow, he ended up highlighting the dangers of inadvertent nuclear escalation when operational missteps are masked as controlled successes.

While the loss of Indian fighter jets on the first night of operations was the most glaring of omissions, several points Chauhan raised by way of explanation provided valuable context regarding the aerial combat. Per his account, the military chiefs had planned to keep the initial operations limited to the lower airspace—unlike the strike at Balakot—by using drones, loitering munition and precision-guided artillery shells. But once Modi said that he wanted something “big,” the union defence minister Rajnath Singh insisted on also including the Bahawalpur headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed as a target. This expanded scope made the use of the air force unavoidable, as Bahawalpur lay beyond the range of other weapon systems. If not for Modi and Rajnath, the IAF would not have been deployed that night.

Chauhan quickly glossed over another controversial aspect of the aerial operations on the first night: the rules of engagement. He claimed that the IAF was free to target anything that impeded its operations and take any action necessary for self-defence. India’s naval attaché in Indonesia, however, said that the political leadership had imposed a constraint that the IAF could not strike military targets. As a result, Pakistan’s air defences were not suppressed before the strikes began. This, combined with Pakistan’s network-centric warfare capabilities developed with the Chinese air force, likely contributed to the loss of IAF fighter jets.