The NSA’s remarks come even as a number of Indian security officials have acknowledged the loss of fighter aircraft during the conflict.

The NSA’s remarks come even as a number of Indian security officials have acknowledged the loss of fighter aircraft during the conflict.

New Delhi: Despite claims by the “foreign press” during the four-day-long India-Pakistan conflict in May, there is perhaps no photograph or satellite imagery indicating any damage on the Indian side, national security adviser Ajit Doval said on Friday (July 11).

His remarks come even as a number of Indian security officials, including Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan, have acknowledged the loss of at least one Indian fighter jet during the conflict.

Speaking at the convocation ceremony at IIT Madras on Friday, Doval said Operation Sindoor is a matter of pride owing to the extent of indigenous content India had used.

Having decided to target nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir that India identified as terrorist infrastructure, its strikes “missed none” of them, said Doval, adding that the entire operation was over in 23 minutes.

“Thereafter, a lot of things are said … foreign press and all these things. They said ‘Pakistan did that and this’. You tell me one photograph, one imagery … which shows any Indian damage being done, even a glass pane having been broken,” Doval continued.

The top security official went on to specifically mention the New York Times as among the press houses that had published articles on the conflict that followed India’s strikes on the nine terror sites.

The New York Times had reported shortly after the conflict ended on the damage that Indian strikes had dealt to a number of Pakistani air bases, including by hitting facilities at the Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi and cratering runways at the Rahim Yar Khan and Sargodha bases.

It had also reported that the limited satellite images available at that time did “not clearly show damage caused by Pakistani strikes even at bases where there was corroborating evidence of some military action”.

But one loss on the Indian side that security officials have admitted to since the end of the conflict is of its fighter aircraft.

Navy Captain Shiv Kumar, a defence attache with the Indian embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, said last month that India lost “some aircraft” during the conflict. He attributed this loss to the “constraint given by the political leadership to not attack the military establishment[s] or their air defences”.

Captain Kumar’s remarks came against the backdrop of claims made by Pakistani officials that their side shot down up to six Indian aircraft, including French-made Rafale fighter jets.

Defence secretary R.K. Singh also said in an interview that while his interlocutor “used the term Rafales in the plural, I can assure you that is absolutely not correct”.

General Chauhan in a June interview to Bloomberg TV had denied as “absolutely incorrect” that six aircraft had been shot down but said that “what is important” is “not the jet being down, but why they were being down”.

The military conflict that followed India’s early morning strikes on May 7 – in turn prompted by the April 22 terrorist attack in Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, which India blamed on Pakistan – lasted four days before ending under a ceasefire on May 10.

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