The Congress on Wednesday called for a structured and comprehensive review of Operation Sindoor, similar to the exercise carried out after the Kargil War, saying "headline-grabbing revelations" cannot be a substitute for a thorough analysis.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said this a day after former chief of defence staff (CDS) Gen Anil Chauhan spoke about operational details of the Indo-Pak conflict post Pahalgam attack.
Ramesh said the former chief of defence staff had made similar claims earlier too in Singapore and then again on Tuesday about Operation Sindoor, in which he said that loitering munitions may have hit Kirana hills though forces did not target it.
He also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during a meeting on April 29 after the Pahalgam attack, decided that "we should teach Pakistan a big lesson" with an "unthinkable" action because India will not tolerate cross-border terrorism. He claimed that the prime minister also told the forces to ensure there is no failure and evidence should be kept.
"Headline-grabbing revelations being made from time to time in interviews and lectures, whether part of a deliberate strategy or not, are no substitute for a structured and comprehensive review exercise like what the Subrahmanyam Committee had carried out," Ramesh said after Chauhan's claims.
Ramesh said that in a media interview given in Singapore on May 30, 2025, the-then CDS Gen Anil Chauhan had made some very significant revelations on Operation Sindoor.
"Just yesterday Gen Chauhan again made some very important revelations that have raised understandable concern," he said.
"It bears recall that four days after the Kargil War had ended, the Vajpayee government had, on July 29, 1999, set up the Kargil Review Committee under the chairmanship of K Subrahmanyam (the current external affairs minister’s father) whose report was tabled in Parliament on February 23, 2000," the Congress leader also said.
Former CDS Gen Anil Chauhan (retd) on Tuesday said the Indian forces “did not target” Pakistan's Kirana Hills, which reportedly has a nuclear facility, and that a lot of loitering munitions were sent at Sargodha, and one of those might have come down after losing its running capacity and hit a hill.
In his clarification made during a talk on 'Operation Sindoor and its Aftermath' here, Gen Chauhan (retd) also backed Air Marshal A K Bharti, who as then Director General of Air Operations (DGAO) of the IAF told reporters on May 12 last year, “We have not hit Kirana Hills, whatever is there.”
India conducted Operation Sindoor against nine terror infrastructure sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) in May 2025, killing over 100 terrorists, to avenge the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack.
India's strikes during the military conflict hit an airbase in Sargodha, and there were reports that the base was linked to an underground nuclear storage facility in Kirana Hills.
(With inputs from PTI)