After weeks of silence, India has admitted for the first time that it lost several fighter jets in a dogfight with Pakistan between May 7 and 10, when the two countries engaged of the largest aerial confrontation in recent history.
New Delhi had largely chosen to avoid any confirmation of warplane losses, after Pakistan said it shot down five attacking Indian jets in the May 7 combat including three state-of the-art French Rafale planes.
Islamabad said it downed five Indian jets in Indian airspace using long-range Chinese weapons and technology. Later, Pakistani officials said they blew up another Indian jet.
The conflicted pushed the region to the edge and it was only after U.S. President Donald Trump intervened that the two countries agreed to a ceasefire.
A top Indian defense official and a senior politician of the ruling BJP party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi confirmed the losses in separate media interviews.
“What is important is that… not the jet being downed, but why they were being downed,” General Anil Chauhan, India’s chief of defense staff, told Bloomberg TV.
He said this during an interview on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore three weeks after the dogfight that took place when India launched aerial strikes into Pakistani territory at a time of heightened tensions over a terror attack that killed 26 tourists in Pahalgam in the Indian-controlled Kashmir.
But Chauhan did not specify the number of planes that India lost and termed the Pakistani claim that it had shot down six planes as “absolutely incorrect.”
However, the Indian defense chief acknowledged that the Indian military made a “tactical mistake.”
“The good part is we were able to understand the tactical mistake which we made, remedy it, rectify it and then implement it again after two days and flew all our jets, again targeting at long range,” he said.
Immediately, after the Pakistani claim Rafale company acknowledged the loss of at least one of their jets while The New York Times reported that local Indian officials confirmed loss of three Indian jets in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir areas.
Separately, a senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, Subramanian Swamy acknowledged the loss of at least five Indian aircraft during the clash against Pakistan.
Speaking on a podcast, Swamy confirmed that Pakistan had downed five Indian fighter jets, including Rafale aircraft, during the military exchange.
He further commented on the performance of Indian and Pakistani jets, stating, “Pakistan shot down five of our aircraft using Chinese fighter jets.” He admitted that ‘the Chinese jets had outperformed the French Rafales.’
The two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbors engaged in heavy shelling and missile firing after the aerial dogfight.
President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between India and Pakistan on May 10 after intense diplomacy conducted through Vice President J D Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Since then, Trump has issued several statements, saying he averted a nuclear war between the two countries, and used the bilateral trade leverage to convince the two countries to stop fight.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s topmost military officer has confirmed that Pakistan and India have pulled back their additional troops from border positions and now the deployment is back to pre-conflict level.
