Daily Times

Exactly a year after Indian claims to have conducted surgical strikes following the Uri attack on 18 September 2016, a number of books, interviews and articles have come out, providing some fuzzy details of the fictitious strikes.

Readers may recall that on 18 September 2016, fire had broken out in a military camp in Uri, during which 19 Indian soldiers of the 6th Bihar Battalion located at the administrative camp of 12 Brigade Headquarters, had been burnt alive in their highly flammable tents. To avoid a court of inquiry and get blamed for negligence, Indian army spun a gory tale of a fictitious attack by so called terrorists and even claimed to have killed the alleged Pakistani protagonists.

The false flag operation infuriated Indian masses who started baying for Pakistan’s blood. In order to satisfy their demand for launching retaliatory actions, the Indian government and army invoked accounts of a fictitious series of surgical strikes inside Azad Jammu and Kashmir in which according to Indian claims, seven “terrorist camps” were decimated and 34 terrorists waiting to be launched into India were killed. The Indian army failed to provide even an iota of evidence of having actually executed the attack leading to the Indian media challenging the veracity of the attacks.

India continues to make preposterous claims like the one about the surgical strike to divert the global community’s attention from its own atrocities in Kashmir

ISPR instantly flew in groups of domestic and international journalists to the locations of the alleged strikes. No trace of the so called strikes was visible this side of the LOC as the alleged assault had been a figment of imagination of the Indian Guderians.?

One year on, after taking their time to fabricate details, Indian military has released information which has resulted in the publication of accounts and interviews by Lieutenant General D. S. Hooda, former General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Indian army’s Northern Command, who was supposedly overseeing operation “Badla” (Revenge). Not only have the names have been withheld, but major details have also been obscured, giving the impression that the entire episode was a bogus drama by the choreographers.

One question that the Indian masses should have asked their extremist leadership and an army which is notorious for its false flag operations is “Did the terrorist attacks cease after the alleged surgical strikes?” The answer is no surgical, because India orchestrates the false flag operations, blaming Pakistan to continue harping on its narrative that Pakistan sponsors terror attacks. If anything, the attacks increased.

India mendacity can be nailed then and there because according to the narrative, Indian informers within the so called terrorist organizations had provided them the exact location of the terror training camps and number of terrorists holed up there. If Indian intelligence is so efficient, why can’t they cannot preempt the so called terror attacks? The answer is that the attacks are false flag operations.

In June 2015, Indian Army’s Para Special Forces unit had supposedly carried out a surgical strike at an NSC (N) Camp inside Myanmar and supposedly eliminated sixty insurgents. While Myanmar had denied that such an assault ever took place, Indian defence planners were emboldened to repeat the sham exercise across the LOC in Pakistan.

Indian Army is notorious for orchestrating fake encounters and blaming Pakistan for conducting the phony attack. Recently, after a Court Martial looking into the false flag operation conducted at Machil on 29 April 2010, Colonel Dinesh Pathania, Captain Opendra, Havildar Devender Kumar, Lance Naik Arun Kumar, Lance Naik Lakhmi, and Rifleman Abbas Hussain of Indian Army have been served with life sentence for planning and executing the fake encounter.

The quintuplet had lured three Kashmiri civilians—Shahzad Khan (27), Shafi Lone (19) and Riyaz Lone (20) of Nadihal village in Rafiabad—to an army camp at Kalaroos in Kupwara with the promise of employing them as porters on high wages, where they were subsequently killed in a staged encounter during the intervening night of 29 and 30 April 2010 at Sona Pindi in Machil sector on the Line of Control buried in a local graveyard. To prove that these three young men were foreign militants, the Indian army painted the face of Shafi Lone with black colour to show he had beard and then taken the picture of his face for records.

The fake encounter was exposed by Jammu and Kashmir police investigation after the families of the victims filed a missing report. Subsequently, when the bodies of these youth were exhumed from Machil graveyard where they had been buried as unidentified Pakistani terrorists, the families identified them as the three missing men from Nadihal village in Rafiabad. This fake encounter triggered massive protests across Kashmir. The government constituted a high-level inquiry commission while the army also ordered a high level probe.

India continues to plan the charade of fake attacks to divert the attention of the world community from its own atrocities against Kashmiris.

The writer is a retired Group Captain of PAF. He is a columnist, analyst and TV Talk show host, who has authored six books on current affairs, including three on China

Published in Daily Times, September 30^th 2017.