The Significance Of Operation Sindoor – A Dharmic Perspective

The mighty sword of Dharma was unsheathed to protect our way of life on 7 May. In a blistering strike, codenamed Operation Sindoor, our three armed services jointly delivered a hammer blow to terror infrastructure within the heart of Pakistan, and those parts of Jammu and Kashmir it still occupies.

In the succeeding three days, following serial counterattacks from Pakistan, the Indian military proceeded to repeat such hammer blows on the Pakistani military as well, so much so, that Rawalpindi was humiliatingly forced to call New Delhi and meekly ask for a ceasefire.

People derived a diverse range of significances from Operation Sindoor, depending upon who they were, where they were, and what they did.

For the senior staff of Swarajya, many in their 30s, and barely old enough to remember the Kargil War, “The destruction of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed complexes in Muridke and Bahawalpur may not have carried great tactical or military significance, but it was a symbolic act of immense emotional and strategic weight.”

To them, “These were not just coordinates on a map; they were the physical embodiments of India’s long-frustrated rage, the ugly, defiant symbols of a state that had bled India with impunity for decades. They stood as monuments to India's silence, its restraint, and to the narrative that Pakistan’s terror infrastructure was untouchable under the nuclear overhang. Strikes on Pakistan’s air bases and radar sites, while more impactful militarily, would not have had the same visceral, transformative effect without this act of symbolic justice.

"Paradoxically, hitting these complexes may have fallen on a lower rung of the escalation ladder, as they were non-state targets, but what they represented made their destruction central to the message India sought to send: that the very foundation of Pakistan's strategic calculus will no longer remain unchallenged.”

For Sudarshan Garg, a senior Swarajya contributor on military matters, Op Sindoor marked the erasure of a decades-old, self-drawn Lakshman Rekha (a limiting factor to action) around Pakistan’s supposed nuclear bogey.

For Western defence analysts, the star of the show was the Indian Air Defence System – an integrated, multi-layered shield which was tested furiously to the hilt by wave after wave of attacks by Pakistani drones, missiles and fighter jets; a test which it passed with flying colours. The shield held, and how! This went way beyond the much-vaunted Israeli Iron Dome air defence system by an order of magnitude. 

The bulk of Iron Dome’s functions are restricted to the most populated parts of Israel – a strip less than 200 kilometres long, and about half as wide. But in India’s case, it was forced to actively defend and fend off aerial attacks along the entire stretch from Kutch to Srinagar – a distance of roughly 1,500 kilometres as the crow flies.

It also had to monitor the airspace for many hundreds of kilometres on either side of the border (while simultaneously keeping a watch on the Chinese). To put it in perspective, the Israeli grid covered by Iron Dome is around 20,000 square kilometres, while the area the Indian air defence system has to protect on the western border alone, is around half a million square kilometres.

For the Chinese, it was a time to gulp disconcertedly, since their cutting-edge weapons and weapons systems, lovingly supplied to ‘Iron Brother’ Pakistan, were proven to be grossly inadequate in denting the Indian shield. Instead of being successfully tested in battle, these Chinese kits were bested in battle by Indian ones. 

Be it the Chinese PL-15 beyond-visual-range-air-to-air missile (BVRAAM), which was supposed to send shivers down the spines of anyone who looked belligerently at China, or the supposedly unstoppable HQ-9 SAM (a surface-to-air missile and itself, a derivative of a Russian design), and its attendant radars, or the supposedly 4.5 generation J-10 fighter jet, the JF-17 fighter jet, and more, the entire lot either failed to interdict Indian attacks, or were ground to dust when they tried to do so.

It is not going to look very good for the Chinese the next time they try to hawk these products to customers.

Worse, the Chinese will now have to go back to the drawing board at three levels – the strategic, the tactical, and the technical – because, for the first time ever, the Indian military decided to deliver a withering, punitive blow to Pakistan when all the mountain passes from Nanga Parbat to Namche Barwa were open. India successfully called the so-called two-front threat, in summer, when the risks for India are at the highest, and came up trumps.

This is a new boldness, backed up by lethal action, for which Beijing does not have a clear answer to at present. And it is only going to get worse for them as India starts inducting extremely advanced weapons platforms over the coming two years, into units whose experience and confidence have now been immeasurably enriched by the ultimate tutor – combat.

If the Chinese think things are not so great for them now because of how the Meteor BVRAAM, the Akash SAM, and our loitering munitions performed, wait till our military soon gets the Astra Mark-3 (a world beating BVRAAM), the Kusha (a long-range SAM), the Rudram Mark-3 (perhaps the best air-to-ground strike missile in the world when it arrives), the next generation Akash-NG SAM, Gallium-Nitride based electro-optical seekers and radars, and many more.

Whether the peaceniks or our swaggering adversaries like it or not, the bald truth is that a heady militarisation of Mother India by indigenous weapons platforms is finally at hand.

Yet for all that, Operation Sindoor is actually best understood in civilisational terms because, in many ways, it reflects the reawakening of our traditional ethos, and the inexorable re-institution of Dharma across our sacred land. In that sense, when Prime Minister Modi stated on 12 May that blood and water could not flow together, or when he made it clear that a terrorist attack on India would be treated as an attack on India by Pakistan, and hence, as an act of war, it was less a doctrinaire shift, and more, a pledge to uphold the foundations of Dharma – ensuring the natural order of things.

So too, when he emphasized that India would not longer be subject to any nuclear blackmail by Pakistan. Terrorism and nuclear blackmail are both adharma, since they represent existential threats to our ancient way of life, and they have to be contested and defeated on the battlefield, if need be, because of an equally ancient truth – that strength is peace.

Thus, in summation, this is the message conveyed to the world by Operation Sindoor: when the blazing sword of Dharma finally surges out of its patient scabbard, and swings in deadly pirouette upon the neck of evil, remember, the rakshasa’s life strands are instantly severed. There is no escape.