by Shiv Aroor
If the first book in the series made the front pages of newspapers for the first and only personal account of the 2016 surgical strikes into PoK, the book in your hands features several operations that took place in the aftermath of that momentous mission. Missions that throw important light on India’s security after that daring revenge strike by the Indian Army’s Special Forces squads, including the 26 February 2019 air strikes in Balakot, Pakistan.
As in the first book, we are also privileged to have been able to feature heroes who went beyond the call of duty to save the lives of others. Stories that still give us sleepless nights, and that we hope will keep you awake too. If there’s one thing that India’s Most Fearless has showed us, it is that there’s an insatiable hunger for stories about our military, told in detail and told well. As this hunger reflects in other books, Bollywood films and documentaries, what we can tell you with certainty is that we are now on an unstoppable train. And we are so happy you are with us on this journey.
We had ended the introduction to the first India’s Most Fearless with, ‘It’s true. Heroes walk among us.’
It won’t ever stop being true.
Prologue
Just after 3.30 a.m. on 26 February 2019, climbing abruptly to 27,000 feet in dark airspace over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), an Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot flying in a single-seat Mirage 2000 fighter jet pushed a button on his flight-stick. A few feet below him, from the rumbling belly of his aircraft, an Israeli-made bomb silently detached itself and dropped away to begin a journey—first gliding and then careening—towards a target over 70 km away. The bomb, fed with satellite coordinates and an on-board guidance chip, had all the information it needed to hurtle to its destination.
The Mirage 2000 was far from home. It had taken off from the Gwalior air force base over 1000 km away earlier that night along with at least six more Mirage jets from the three squadrons based there. Over the hour the jets flew over central India and into the northern sector. Following in their wake, five more Mirage 2000 jets took off in the darkness from an air base in Punjab.
The dozen Mirages, flying in three separate and unequal formations, weren’t alone in the air. Two airborne early warning jets, an Embraer Netra from the Bathinda air base and a higher performance Phalcon jet from Agra were already in the air, their powerful radars and sensors on full alert to the mission ahead. Communications between aircraft were kept to a minimum. This was a mission with almost no room for deviation unless absolutely necessary. And it needed to last for as little time as possible.
As the three Mirage formations flew in a circuit at low altitude, very much in the manner of night flying training sorties conducted by squadrons, ten jets more roared off the tarmac from two more air bases, including Sukhoi Su-30 MKI fighters from the forward air base at Halwara. It was this pack of Su-30s that would play a crucial role in what came next.
With a total of twenty-two IAF fighters in the air, the jets slowly mixed their formations to create three separate packs—two mixed packs of Mirage 2000 and Su-30 fighters. And a third pack comprised only of Su-30s. While it’s tempting to think of these three packs as neat little jet formations in the sky, it was nothing quite like that. The jets in each pack flew tens of kilometres from each other, and were only bound by a loose common flightpath and mission profile.
Shortly after 3 a.m., the mission began with a pre-planned deception.
The third fighter pack, consisting of big, heavy Su-30 jets, turned south, heading out of Punjab and into the Rajasthan sector, all the while ensuring it remained prominent and visible to Pakistani radars on the other side of the international border. Turning around over Jodhpur, the fighters began provocatively flying in the direction of the international border north of the Chandan firing ranges, their noses pointed towards a Pakistani city that couldn’t possibly have been on a higher alert at the time—Bahawalpur, 250 km to the north, the city that was home to the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s (JEM’s) headquarters and largest terror training facilities. The IAF planners had counted on Pakistan’s ‘hair-trigger’ state of alert to provoke a reaction. It happened within minutes.
The Pakistan Air Force scrambled a group of F-16 jets from the Mushaf air base in Sargodha about 320 km to the north of Bahawalpur. Just as the jets were getting airborne and moving south to fend off any possible attack by the Indian Su-30s, the second IAF pack, comprising Mirage 2000s and Su-30s, broke away from its circuit and turned south over Jammu along a radial pointed towards Sialkot and Lahore in Pakistan, both large and commercially important cities. This second pack split further, with one part flying along a radial that would pass through Pakistan’s Okara and lead once again to Bahawalpur.
The twin air manoeuvres from two directions doubled the air threat to the ‘capital city’ of the JeM. More F-16s departed Sargodha to engage with this second Indian threat. Pakistan’s instantaneous scrambling of fighters wasn’t surprising to Indian radar controllers and sensor operators on the two airborne early warning jets. The country’s air defences would have been on their highest state of readiness since the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, an act of carnage terrible enough that it got India to seriously consider retaliatory air strikes for the first time.
And now, for twelve days without pause, Pakistan’s military had cranked its alertness levels to maximum.
Eleven days earlier, at 9.30 a.m. on 15 February 2019, the chiefs of the Indian armed forces and intelligence agencies, top ministers and the National Security Advisor arrived at Delhi’s leafy 7, Lok Kalyan Marg compound where the Prime Minister of India lives and sometimes operates from. It was far from a routine weekly meeting for the Prime Minister to take stock of national security.
Eighteen hours earlier, 800 kilometres north, in the Lethapora area of Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district, a vehicle packed with explosives and driven by a young man named Adil Ahmad Dar, had managed to snake between vehicles of a large convoy of Srinagar-bound trucks carrying 2500 troops from the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), and rammed it. The explosion killed forty troops, spattering the highway with their blood and body parts. Minutes after the blast, a stream of pictures of the mangled vehicles and sickening carnage taken from mobile phones of locals and first responders flooded social media.
With the Pakistan-administered JeM terror group claiming responsibility for the attack, the Prime Minister had convened this meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) solely to assess how India could respond. Forty minutes later, the meeting was finished. Asked if air strikes on a terror target were a viable option, IAF Chief Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa responded in the affirmative, also briefing the Cabinet Committee that the country’s jets would be ready to strike with confirmed targets in a matter of days. He was given two weeks.
From 16–20 February, the IAF worked with intelligence agencies at the operations room in Delhi’s Vayu Bhawan. With National Security Advisor Ajit Doval receiving a daily update on proceedings, the deliberations were honed by satellite imagery, human intelligence from the ground in Pakistan and PoK, and photographs from a pair of Heron drones flying daily missions along the Line of Control (LoC).
On 21 February, the IAF presented a classified set of ‘target tables’ to the government via the National Security Advisor.
The first in the list of seven separate target options was a JeM terror training compound that sat on a hill called Jabba Top outside the city of Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. The IAF recommended Balakot, just 100 km from Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, since it was a secluded target with the lowest probability of non-terrorist casualties. The two other ‘viable’ targets presented to the government were in PoK—Muzzafarabad, 23 km south-east of Balakot, and Chakothi about 70 km away. But these two, along with Bahawalpur, carried not just the risk of collateral damage, but a slightly higher chance of being hindered by Pakistani air defences. Among the remaining options was Muridke, north of Lahore, the city that held the headquarters of that other dreaded India-foc
used terror group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). This too was deemed a highly risky target to consider.
By midnight on 22 February, a highly controlled chain of command decided that the Indian jets would strike the first target in the list—the one outside Pakistan’s Balakot. Every man and woman in the secret chain was aware that if such a mission went through, it would be India’s first air strike on Pakistani soil since the 1971 war. What amplified the mission ahead was that the two countries weren’t at war in 2019. Could such a mission change that?
There was another important reason why Balakot was chosen. Unlike Muzzafarabad and Chakothi, Balakot was in Pakistan and not PoK. As an international message, an air strike on sovereign Pakistani soil—as opposed to PoK, which India considers its own territory—would make all the difference in the world.
The target dossier submitted to the government also contained pages of data detailing the latest intelligence assessments of the kind of damage that could be caused to terrorist infrastructure in each case. In the case of Balakot, apart from satellite imagery and some medium-grade electronic intelligence, the Indian intelligence agencies had also been able to procure invaluable human inputs from Balakot town. The intelligence, obtained from Indian ‘assets’ on the ground, provided invaluable shape to the target, and was the original source of a number that would later be the subject of much controversy and debate. India’s assets in Balakot had reported that there would be at least 300 terrorists and terror trainees on site at Jabba Top at any given time. In other words, a facility that was known to house a significant enough number of handlers, terrorist recruits and ideologues, to justify a high-risk air strike from airspace peppered with and primed for anti-air defence.
As a fully intelligence-based operation, it was imperative that India chose targets that involved not just terror infrastructure, but the presence of a significant number of terrorists at any given time. Apart from the National Technical Research Organization’s (NTRO) signal intelligence inputs, it was this human intelligence that helped guide and lock India’s choice of target.
It wasn’t the first time India was using such human assets for an offensive operation in hostile territory. In September 2016, during the Indian Army Special Forces ‘surgical strikes’ in PoK, Indian assets 1 in the JeM had confirmed the terror launch pads as viable targets, revealed first in the first book of the India’s Most Fearless series.
A data analyst with one of India’s intelligence agencies told the authors, ‘An operation of this kind is very difficult without human intelligence on the ground. It would have been a huge risk to do so without a conclusive word to corroborate your other inputs, whether satellite or electronic.’
An Army officer who served on the composite intelligence team that formulated the target packages during the 2016 trans-LoC strikes says, ‘The question is not about whether ground assets were used or not. They 100 per cent were. The only question, might I add that nobody needs to ever know about, is whether these were the same assets that helped in 2016 or similar assets—or assets of a totally different kind. That will hopefully remain guesswork. Let films and books (!) do the guessing.’
On 24 February, pilots of the Mirage 2000 squadrons in Gwalior were briefed about the mission. That same day, aircraft would be airborne over central India for a short mock air drill alongside a Phalcon AWACS jet and Ilyushin-78M mid-air refuelling tanker from Agra. The jets taking part in the drill didn’t return to Gwalior, instead landing at a base in Punjab. They would remain at the base all of the next day.
The IAF was about to take a violent break from history, but in Delhi, every effort was made to ensure that it was business as usual. On the night of 25 February, hours before the Mirages took to the air on their mission, the IAF hosted a customary farewell banquet for the outgoing chief of the Western Air Command, Air Marshal C. Hari Kumar—he was retiring three days later. The sit-down dinner was organized at the Akash Air Force Officer’s mess near Delhi’s India Gate, where just a few hours earlier Prime Minister Narendra Modi had inaugurated the country’s National War Memorial.
In his speech, IAF Chief Dhanoa regaled the audience with stories of how he and Air Marshal Hari Kumar had gone to the same school—Rashtriya Indian Military College (RIMC), Dehradun—and were from the same house. It was a typical military evening of mirth and nostalgia. The banquet had over eighty senior air force officers in attendance. But only a handful of them, IAF chief Dhanoa and Air Marshal Hari Kumar included, were in the ‘need-to-know’ loop on what was about to happen. Those who weren’t in that loop confirm to the authors that there was absolutely no indication that evening that some of their service personnel were about to soar out across the border to drop bombs inside Pakistan.
After farewell speeches and dessert, the banquet wound up at 11 p.m. IAF Chief Dhanoa was driven back to his official residence on Delhi’s Akbar Road. He tells the authors he received a final update on preparations before turning in for a quick couple of hours of rest—everything was in control by a team he knew he could trust his life with. Thirty minutes before the Mirages took off from Gwalior, Dhanoa woke up to plug back into the secret proceedings.
Four kilometres away at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg, Prime Minister Modi was awake too. He received his final pre-mission brief 20 minutes before the jets departed Gwalior. There would be communication silence for the next half hour—covering the most crucial part of the mission. The intrusion.
As the second and third fighter packs flew menacing flight paths on the Jodhpur–Bahawalpur and Jammu–Sialkot radials, the first pack, comprising six Mirage 2000 jets, crossed the LoC at low altitude in the Keran sector in Kupwara. Flying over the Athmuqam town in PoK, the six jets spread out further and climbed, crossing between 12–15 km into hostile airspace.
With the Jabba Top hill now in effective range, and given the all clear from radar controllers in the Phalcon jet, the aircraft dropped their bombs one by one. Five munitions from five aircraft dropped away in the cold dark, whooshing west out of PoK and into sovereign Pakistani airspace.
Tracking the weapons as they closed in on Jabba Top, pilots in the air and controllers on the ground knew history had already been made. The IAF weaponry was about to hit targets on Pakistani soil for the first time in over forty-seven years—and, crucially, for the first time when the two countries weren’t involved in a full-blown war. The very act of pushing the button and letting those bombs loose was a message, the IAF leadership would tell pilots in a debrief later.
Seconds after the weapons release, a warning call went out to the Mirages as they tracked the bombs screaming towards their targets using infrared sensors. Three Pakistani jets had been scrambled from the Minhas air base in Pakistan’s Kamra town, just over 60 km north-west of Islamabad. Tracked by the Indian Phalcon jet, the Pakistani fighters, believed to be Chinese-origin JF-17 Thunder jets, flew at full throttle towards PoK. It was near impossible for Pakistani defences to know that Indian bombs were headed towards Balakot.
With Pakistani jets inbound, Indian controllers on the Phalcon jet instructed the Mirage pilots to turn around immediately, drop altitude quickly and return across the LoC. With the Pakistani jets well over 50 km away, the six jets would cross back between Chowkibal and the Leepa Valley, flying close to Chakothi, one of the targets that had been considered but dropped in favour of Balakot.
The intrusion into hostile airspace had lasted only a few minutes. The six Mirages, their backs watched by the Phalcon jet, landed safely in Srinagar. The other Mirages and Su-30s from the second and third pack would also be summoned back to bases in Punjab. A debrief of the full mission would later affirm that the second and third packs had very ably lured Pakistani ‘first responder’ F-16s away from the area of attack to the north, and kept them engaged and ‘on edge’ until the strike mission was complete. The Netra early warning jet from Bathinda would record the deception, providing compelling battlespace imagery for post-mission discussions.
Thirty hours after the air strikes on Balako
t, the historic mission would be overshadowed briefly by Pakistan’s retaliation attempt over the LoC in the Sunderbani sector near Jammu, using a pack of fighters that included F-16s, Mirage IIIs and JF-17s from the Sargodha and Rafiqui air bases. While the Balakot air strikes had passed without the names of any of the Indian pilots or personnel involved reaching the media, one name would per force become public the following morning. Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, in his MiG-21 Bison jet, would be shot down while chasing a Pakistani intruder back across the LoC. With its pilot repatriated to India barely 48 hours later, the IAF would publicly credit Varthaman with having shot down a Pakistani F-16 jet during the air joust, triggering an uninterrupted storm of claims and counterclaims, with questions likely to linger indefinitely.
The true history of that late winter week, however, would be in the work done in darkness by a group of IAF pilots—many of them young—who, under instructions, had flown into the most hostile airspace imaginable, to conduct a mission never done before. Each of those pilots will have known the risks and the substantial chances that they could be shot down by ground fire or surface-to-air missiles in an area that was on high alert. Just how the Indian Mirages managed to make their way so deep into PoK unchecked will likely be a low-profile introspection within Pakistan’s military. Just as the events of the following morning will be one for the IAF.
While the authors have interviewed several officers involved or familiar with the 26 February mission, the pilots must remain nameless. At the time that this book is published, the historic air strike on Balakot remains a classified operation.