General Anil Chauhan appears to confirm India lost at least one aircraft during the brief conflict with Pakistan earlier this month.
India’s chief of defence staff says the country suffered initial losses in the air during a recent military conflict with neighbouring Pakistan, but declined to give details.
“What was important is, why did these losses occur, and what we will do after that,” General Anil Chauhan told the Reuters news agency on Saturday on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore.
India and Pakistan were engaged in a four-day conflict this month, their worst standoff since 1999, before a ceasefire was agreed on May 10. More than 70 people were killed in missile, drone and artillery fire on both sides, but there are competing claims on the casualties.
India says more than 100 “terrorists” were killed in its “precision strikes” on several “terror camps” across Pakistan, which rejects the claim, saying more than 30 Pakistani civilians were killed in the Indian attacks.
New Delhi, meanwhile, says nearly two dozen civilians were killed on the Indian side, most of them in Indian-administered Kashmir, along the disputed border.
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The fighting between the two nuclear powers was triggered by an attack on tourists in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir on April 22 that killed 26 people, almost all of them tourists. New Delhi blamed Pakistan for supporting the armed group behind the attack, an allegation Islamabad denied.
During their conflict, Pakistan had also claimed to have downed at least five Indian military jets, including at least three Rafale fighters. But Chauhan on Saturday dismissed it as “absolutely incorrect”, confirming his country had lost at least one aircraft.
“I think what is important is that, not the jet being down, but why they were being down,” he told Bloomberg TV in a separate interview in Singapore.
On May 11, a day after the ceasefire, India’s Air Marshal AK Bharti told reporters in New Delhi that “all our pilots are back home”, adding that “we are in a combat scenario, and that losses are a part of combat”.
Chauhan said on Saturday India switched tactics after suffering losses in the air on the first day of conflict and established a decisive advantage.
“So we rectified tactics and then went back on the [May] 7th, 8th and 10th in large numbers to hit airbases deep inside Pakistan, penetrated all their air defences with impunity, carried out precision strikes,” he said.
Islamabad has denied it suffered any losses of planes but has acknowledged its airbases suffered some hits, although losses were minimal.
Chauhan said while the fighting had ceased, the Indian government had made it clear that it would respond “precisely and decisively should there be any further terror attacks emanating from Pakistan”.
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“So that has its own dynamics as far [as] the armed forces are concerned. It will require us to be prepared 24/7,” he said.
Chauhan also said that although Pakistan is closely allied with China, which borders India in the north and the northeast, there was no sign of any actual help from Beijing during the conflict.
“While this was unfolding from [April] 22nd onwards, we didn’t find any unusual activity in the operational or tactical depth of our northern borders, and things were generally all right,” he told Reuters.
Asked whether China may have provided any satellite imagery or other real-time intelligence to Pakistan during the conflict, Chauhan said such imagery was commercially available and could have been procured from China as well as other sources.