Operation Parakram

25 May 2002: The Indian military leadership has been directed to hold back a major offensive operation planned against Pakistan in the first week of June, top officials said.

Prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told the military at the meeting of the cabinet committee on security on Thursday after returning from Jammu and Kashmir to delay its so-called "degradation operation" against Pakistani defence positions in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

Military officials said that Vajpayee told them in characteristic style to "wait" a little longer.

Vajpayee said in Kashmir after visiting frontline troops and hospitalised victims of the Kaluchak massacre that the sky had cleared but lightening could fall.

The degradation operation has been conceived to disable Pakistan's capacity to fight a "cohesive, responsive, and defensive" battle in the area of Indian offence (See Special Report, "India to degrade Pak military along LoC," 24 May 2002).

The operation will precede a military offensive and would involve complete destruction of a large military zone 50 square kilometres or more in size using artillery, missiles, rockets, fighter aircraft and even tanks.

Officials said that the degradation option is more or less closed with early monsoons forecasted for northern India in the first week of July.

"There is perhaps a small window of opportunity in June still left," a senior official said.

"If that is closed, we begin the long wait for the next campaigning season."

The army has already deployed newly-acquired military hardware for degradation operations.

New equipment include the US gun-locating radar ANTPQ, Israeli Searcher 1, Searcher 2 and Hiron UAVs, Israeli anti-infiltration sound sensors, and the Russian multi-barrel rocket system SMERCH.

Multi-barrel rocket systems were enormously effective during the Kargil War.

The degradation operations were designed to be part of Operation Parakram III launched after the Kaluchak massacre.

The Indian Army had commenced impressment of vehicles for the impending war with Pakistan under Operation Parakram III.

"This has been put on hold," an official said.

The Indian Army has also delayed certain strategic manoeuvres in the Punjab plains.