New Delhi: Former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan (retd) on Tuesday revealed claimed that Kirana Hills. which houses Pakistan’s nuclear assets. was inadvertently hit by an armed drone after it had run out of fuel during Operation Sindoor. He revealed that the Indian Air Force (IAF) had hit the Bholari airbase after it skipped the Skardu air base in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), the primary target, due to bad weather.

Gen. Chauhan (retd) said that the IAF’s then-Director General of Air Operations. Air Marshal A.K. Bharti (retd). during his briefing on Operation Sindoor had rightly clarified that India did not target Kirana Hills. “I can give an explanation. Before those strikes, we had sent a lot of loiter ammunitions at Sargodha. And Kirana Hills, is 10 km north of Sargodha,” Gen. Chaihan said at a talk. 'Operation Sindoor and its Aftermath', at the Vivekananda Centre here.
“So the loitering mission is looking for radars which are in and around Sargodha, and it has a lifetime, which means it will loiter for about two hours and once it does not find a target, it comes down and hits somewhere. It must have come and hit one of those hills. So that could be one of the reasons as to what people asked, because Pakistani media also showed some kind of images in which there was smoke coming out from Kirana Hills," he said.
On the IAF strike at Bholari, the former CDS said: “Once the Pakistanis had picked up the phone and said they wanted to talk at about 10 am. The Air Chief asked me whether he should strike Sargodha, I said, Go ahead... I said, could you please identify two more targets, so one of the targets he identified was Skardu. We gave a yes, but after some time, the weather was bad over it and they had to change over to Bholari"

He said that one of the couple of principles which “we thought in the escalation matrix which we laid for ourselves was that the last strike or the winning note will always be delivered by us and not by the Pakistanis.”
"If I had to list out a couple of reasons for India's victory, I would say that we had better situational awareness, better battlefield transparency because we are better networked. And Army, Navy, and Air Force, this situation was available to us in one manner for all of us. So, we were able to make better decisions... Second thing I could attribute to victory was, I think, clear political direction, which gave us a free hand to plan operations,” he added.
The former CDS said that Pakistan's understanding of the situation was quite poor, even in the maritime domain. “Their daily briefings would tell where a carrier battle group was moving in the Arabian Sea, and when I checked back from the Western Naval Command as to where the carrier battle group was on those days, it was almost about 100 to 200 to 300 nautical miles off from that place. So means either they were getting wrong inputs of our carrier battle group or means they were just not accurate because they were dependent only on foreign sources for this... because their long-range maritime aircraft did not fly at all," he said.
Gen Chauhan said that commercial satellite facilities are available from a number of US companies and there were a number of Chinese companies in the field which provide commercial images. “I think Pakistan felt that when I said that they were blind and they did not know the results of their strikes. Till (May) 12th, they were trying their best to obtain images so that they would have some evidence of a target with their head. But unfortunately, once they did not get it, they tried other Chinese satellites also... But the fact is that they're not able to hit targets. They did, of course, try. So commercial satellite images of China are available to anyone. Anyone can buy. So it's not just Pakistanis," he added.

He also said the April 29 meeting headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi 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 and it must end, Gen. Chauhan (retd) said.

PM Modi told the forces to “do it at your own time, but ensure there is no reason for failure” and “we should have evidence”, Gen. Chauhan said.

This is the first time Gen. Chauhan has shared in public details of the decisions taken during that meeting, held days before India conducted the military operation against nine terror infrastructure sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) in May 2025, killing over 100 terrorists, to avenge the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 last year.

The Prime Minister “told us that he is not under any kind of political pressure to do it immediately”. He had also said, “do it at your own time, but ensure there is no reason for failure, either due to human or technical reason, and we should have evidence of whatever we do”, Gen. Chauhan said.

He suggested that the Bahawalpur target was especially included in the list during the meeting for this reason and the night hour was chosen for the strikes to minimise civilian casualties. “That was on the insistence of the defence minister, because the PM had said that “we need to do something big”, Gen Chauhan (retd) said.

“This target was at a distance, yet we included it. Once we included the Bahawalpur target in the list, the use of air (power) became inherent in it; loiter munitions and drones won't be able to reach, and success wouldn't have been ensured,” he added.

Markaz Taiba in Muridke, and Markaz Subhanallah in Bahawalpur (linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed) were among the nine targets hit by the Indian forces in the early hours of May 7 last year.


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