India needs 7-10 days to defeat Pak in war: Modi

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said Pakistan has lost three wars against India, whose armed forces would need not more than “a week to 10 days” to defeat the neighbouring country in case of another war.

Speaking at the National Cadet Corps (NCC) rally here, Modi said Pakistan has waged a proxy war against India in Jammu and Kashmir for decades and killed thousands of people and security personnel but previous governments did not give the armed forces the permission to launch operations across the border.

“Many speeches were given but when our armed forces sought permission to take action, they were refused. But today the country is moving forward with ‘yuva soch’ (youthful thinking). So, it carries out surgical strikes and airstrikes to teach terrorists a lesson in their own backyard,” the PM said during his 45-minute speech.

He was referring to targeted operations against terror camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) in September 2016 and the Indian Air Force’s air strikes against terror bases in Pakistan’s Balakot last February — both swift actions taken after

Indian soldiers and paramilitary personnel were killed in suicide attacks in Kashmir.

Modi said the two strikes led to peace not only in J&K but also in other parts of the country where no terror strikes had taken place. “Terrorism has been contained to a great extent,” he said. India will mark the first anniversary of the air strikes on February 26. The strikes on terror bases of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) were India’s response to last year’s Pulwama suicide attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.

Pakistan’s behaviour has changed after the two strikes as the neighbour realised that the Indian political establishment would not shy away from ordering

cross-border operations in response to terror attacks, two senior military officers said asking not to be named. Cross-border operations have been carried out several times in PoK, but the strikes of September 2016 and February 2019 were different because the political leadership took ownership of the action and announced India’s muscular military response to Pakistansponsored terrorism to the world. On January 11, army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane said if the government ordered his force to seize control of PoK, it would act on those directions. “As far as PoK is concerned, there was a parliamentary resolution many years ago that the whole of erstwhile J&K is a part of India,” he said.