Kirana Hills strike claims have circulated since the first week of Operation Sindoor, and former Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan has now said an Indian loitering munition may well have come down on one of those hills while hunting for radars around Sargodha.

He was speaking on Tuesday at the 'VIMARSH' event on Operation Sindoor and its aftermath, hosted by the Vivekananda International Foundation in New Delhi.

What Gen Chauhan said about the Kirana Hills strike

Defence sources said India had sent a number of loitering missions around Sargodha ahead of the strikes, tasked with locating radars in the area. Gen Chauhan explained that Kirana Hills sits roughly 10 kilometres north of Sargodha, and that the loitering platforms carried an endurance of around two hours.

"It must have come and hit one of those hills," Gen Chauhan said, describing what a munition does once its window closes without a radar found. Pakistani media, he noted, had aired images of smoke rising from the area at the time, and those images did more than anything else to keep the Kirana Hills strike question alive in the months that followed.

Kirana Hills has long been described as housing nuclear-related facilities linked to the Sargodha airbase, which is why the question of whether it was struck resurfaces periodically. When it first came up during Operation Sindoor briefings in May 2025, the Indian Air Force had said no target there had been hit. Gen Chauhan's account fills in what a loitering munition does at the end of its endurance, and how that could place an Indian munition on the hills without the site itself sitting on any target list.


Networking and battlefield transparency behind the operational gains

Gen Chauhan attributed much of India's operational success during Operation Sindoor to improved situational awareness. Greater networking among the Army, Navy and Air Force, he said, gave commanders a clearer, real time picture of the battlefield as the operation unfolded.

"We were able to make better decisions," he said. He also credited clear political direction, which he said gave the armed forces a free hand to plan and execute their operations without hesitation once the political leadership had set the terms of engagement. The account adds to other operational disclosures around Operation Sindoor, including the DRDO chief's own remarks on BrahMos's role during the operation.

Pakistan's satellite imagery push came up short

On Pakistan's efforts to assess the outcome of India's strikes, the former CDS said commercial satellite imagery, including from Chinese companies, is available to anyone willing to pay for it and wait out the acquisition process. He suggested Islamabad had tried using such imagery to build its own picture of the damage, without much success.

A naval position claim off by hundreds of nautical miles

Gen Chauhan also questioned the reliability of Pakistan's battlefield intelligence, pointing to its account of Indian naval movements during the operation. Pakistani briefings had reportedly placed an Indian carrier battle group at specific coordinates in the Arabian Sea.

Checks with the Western Naval Command, he said, showed the group was actually somewhere between 100 and 300 nautical miles from where it had been described, a gap he attributed to Pakistan's reliance on foreign sources for maritime tracking. Its own long range maritime patrol aircraft, he added, did not fly during the period in question.

The last strike doctrine, and how the ceasefire actually came about

Describing India's escalation approach, Gen Chauhan said one of its guiding principles was that the last strike would always be delivered by India.

On US President Donald Trump's repeated mediation claims, Gen Chauhan was unambiguous. The understanding was reached directly between the two Directors General of Military Operations. "The ceasefire was decided between two DGMOs, and that's it. I don't see the role of anyone else," he said.

Operation Sindoor was launched on 7 May 2025, in response to the Pahalgam terror attack of 22 April that year in which 26 people were killed, and targeted terrorist infrastructure across Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir. Gen Chauhan's remarks follow NSA Ajit Doval's own account of the hours after Pahalgam, and come more than a year after Gen Chauhan, then still serving as CDS, spoke publicly on defence industry delivery and export timelines, part of a wider pattern of India's military leadership speaking on the record about the operational and diplomatic record of Operation Sindoor, whose broader arc is also captured in an official backgrounder issued at the time.

He went further, raising a question of his own. How, he asked, had word of the impending ceasefire reached Washington before India itself could announce it through its own official channels. He said he was certain the information had not come from the Indian side, leaving the question of the leak's actual origin unresolved for now.