‘Bandar mara gaya’: 15 min after missiles struck Balakot, a phone call in Delhi

Ahead of the Balakot air strike, a posse of Indian fighters was scrambled in the Rajasthan sector to get the Pakistan Air Force to move all its assets to intercept the Indians over the skies of Bahawalpur. The IAF’s Mirage 2000 fighters released their Spice 2000 penetrator bombs, each packed with 90 kg explosives, soon after.

Updated on: Feb 26, 2021, 10:27:48 IST

By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi, Hindustan Times

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At 3.45am on February 26, 2019, the then Air Chief BS Dhanoa made a telephone call to National Security Adviser Ajit Doval on a special RAX number. RAX is an ultra-secure fixed-line network.

“The monkey has been killed,” he said in Hindi. “Bandar mara gaya.”

The message meant that the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist training camp at Balakot in hinterland Pakistan had been taken down by Indian fighter jets in a daring pre-dawn operation across the border.

Dhanoa made similar calls to then Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Secretary (Research and Analysis Wing) Anil Dhasmana.

NSA Doval, in turn, informed Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Also Watch | 'Big mistake': PM Modi's stern warning to terror outfits

The Indian response to the February 14, 2019 Pulwama suicide attack engineered by JeM, in which 40 CRPF troopers were killed was complete. Now two years later, more granular details of the operation, including its name, and the failure of one missile with optical guidance have emerged.

Top officials and functionaries involved in Balakot strike told HT that the code name Bandar was deliberately chosen in order to confuse Pakistani intelligence, which, the Indian side hoped, would think the reference was to the JeM HQ at Bhawalpur with the terror group’s ailing chief Masood Azhar living securely within the compound.

Also Read | NSA Doval led secret back-channels talks with Pak for months before DGMO pact

Ahead of the strike, and in keeping with this deception, a posse of Indian fighters was scrambled in the Rajasthan sector to force the Pakistan Air Force to move all its assets to intercept the Indians over the skies of Bhawalpur. As a result, when IAF’s upgraded Mirage 2000 fighters released their Spice 2000 penetrator bombs which are packed with 90 kg explosives, the closest Pakistani aircraft was 150 kilometres away. IAF deliberately chose February 26 as D-day; it was the last quarter of the full moon; and the fighters successfully evaded Pakistani radars flying below the Pir Panjal ranges. According to the officials, all five bombs struck home at 330 am IST or 300 am Pakistani time.

The sixth bomb carrying optical guidance making did not fire due to a software snag. The only place left untouched in Balakot was the mosque, which had already started preparation of the Fajr namaz.

After the strike was completed, a cabinet meeting was summoned by PM Narendra Modi with all senior ministers, top PMO officials, Cabinet Secretary, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Secretary (RAW), Director Intelligence Bureau and then Air Chief present. It was at this meeting that PM Modi openly thanked Indian intelligence, particularly RAW for its actionable intelligence and the intrepid IAF chief for a daring operation. A beaming Finance Minister Arun Jaitley patted both the leaders on their backs and Doval shook hands with Dhanoa and Dhasmana.

However, national security planners were concerned about the last missile not being fired as the job of optical guidance was to get proof of the strike and counter any Pakistani or western propaganda about the strike. Sure enough, the Pakistani propaganda machine swung into action immediately by showing images of high explosive ordnance in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir to suggest that the strike had failed. The officials said IAF deliberately chose penetrator bombs so that there was minimal collateral damage; they added that images from within the Balakot camp showed at least 300 jihadists present a day before the strike. According to the officials, much of the actionable intelligence for IAF was routed through then RAW deputy chief Samant Goel (now the chief of the agency), and at least some of it came from a source within the camp.

It is still not clear whether the Indian mole inside the Balakot camp survived the Indian missiles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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