UPA did 3 surgical strikes but didn’t show off: Rahul

› When the army came to Manmohan Singh and said we need to retaliate against Pakistan... they also said we want it to be secret, for our own purposes

RAHUL GANDHI, Congress president

› You (Rahul Gandhi) will not realise what difference this (Uri) surgical strike made. Every soldier of the country... has a feeling that his govt stands behind them

AMIT SHAH, BJP president

NEW DELHI: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday asserted that the Indian Army had conducted three surgical strikes in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was in power, but those operations were kept under the wraps at the force’s behest.

Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a public interaction at Udaipur in pollbound Rajasthan, Gandhi accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of turning the targeted September 2016 operation into a “political asset” to garner votes during the Uttar Pradesh elections.

“Do you know that like Narendra Modi’s surgical strike, (former PM) Manmohan Singh did that three times? When the army came to Manmohan Singh and said we need to retaliate against Pakistan for what they’ve done, they also said we want it to be secret, for our own purposes,” Gandhi said.

Several senior serving and retired army officers Hindustan Times spoke to confirmed that cross-border operations had been carried out several times in PoK, but the surgical strike of September 2016 was different because the political leadership took ownership of the action and announced India’s muscular military response to the world. The operation was in retaliation for an attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri, Kashmir, the same month that claimed the lives of 19 soldiers. The suicide attackers had come from Pakistan.

A defence ministry spokesperson refused comments on Gandhi’s statement, saying the matter fell in the political domain.

The ruling BJP called Gandhi’s remarks an insult to the soldiers who died in Uri.

“I am not aware of the specifics he (Gandhi) is talking about. But yes, some cross-border operations were conducted in the past. The September 2016 strikes were different because the operation was on a much larger scale compared to the previous strikes and the Modi government acknowledged that we had gone across,” said former Northern Army commander Lieutenant General DS Hooda, under whose watch the 2016 surgical strikes were conducted.