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Operation Sindoor a defining moment in counter-terror strategy: President
“The world took note not only of India’s military capability but of India’s moral clarity to act firmly, yet responsibly in the pursuit of peace,” she said
President Droupadi Murmu on Thursday described the recent success of Operation Sindoor as a defining moment in India’s counter-terror and deterrence strategy, adding that the country acted firmly, yet responsibly.
“The world took note not only of India’s military capability but of India’s moral clarity to act firmly, yet responsibly in the pursuit of peace,” she said in her special address at the Chanakya Defence Dialogue 2025.
Operation Sindoor marked New Delhi’s direct military response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack in which 26 people were killed. India launched the operation in the early hours of May 7 and struck terror and military installations in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) before the May 10 ceasefire.
The armed forces, she said, have exemplified professionalism and patriotism in guarding the sovereignty of India. “During every security challenge, whether conventional, counter-insurgency or humanitarian, our forces have displayed remarkable adaptability and resolve.”
In her speech, she touched upon the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.
The international system is being rewritten by contesting power centres, technological disruptions and shifting alliances, she said. “New domains of competition — cyber, space, information and cognitive warfare are blurring the lines between peace and conflict.”
India has shown that strategic autonomy can coexist with global responsibility, the President said. “Our diplomacy, our economy and our armed forces together project an India that seeks peace, but is prepared to protect its borders and its citizens with strength and conviction.”
She hailed the army for reforming structures, re-orienting doctrines and redefining capabilities to be future-ready and mission-capable across all domains.
In his address, defence secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh said if India becomes a defence technological and industrial powerhouse, then national security can take care of itself to a great extent.
“If you have that kind of technological and industrial advantage, in general, you will be able to win conflicts — short or long. And that is the top-most priority area for the defence ministry as we move towards a new era of industrial reforms and collaboration with the government,” Singh said. His address was on Reimagining Defence Reforms for Resilient National Security.
India, Singh stressed, needs to emulate some of its admittedly successful adversaries like China that have built a hybrid defence and industrial machine which is able to blend central direction with market discipline using enforceable key performance indicators.
“As a result, they are able to scale up complex systems very quickly. In India, we need to bring together our defence public sector undertakings (DPSUs) and private firms into one dual production line, and mandate some of our DPSUs into more focused subsidiary level companies with clear cut targets and delivery linked pays. This includes the Defence Research and Development Organisation when it comes to achieving development and production milestones and insisting on hard targets to cut costs, speed up production and spin off civilian use technologies,” Singh said.
India needs to move from the overwhelm.ing reliance on the public sector to a full acceptance of the role of the private sector as an equal partner, with a focus on creating a level playing field so that any company that manufactures in India is given equal treatment, the defence secretary said.
He said it was a sobering thought that for protecting 17% of the world’s population, India accounted for only 3% (compared to China’s 12%) of the world’s defence expenditure. “Part of the reason has been that we have not displayed the ability to either sign contracts quickly enough or to deliver on contracts quickly enough. But that is changing,” he said.
The ongoing defence reforms, Singh added, seek to create a more agile, capable and future-ready defence system that can guard India’s national interests more effectively.
In his keynote address, army chief General Upendra Dwivedi said the army had adopted a three-phase “hop, step and jump” approach to build capabilities and graduate to the next level of integrated future-ready force design by 2047 in sync with the government’s Viksit Bharat vision.
He said the reforms initiated by the military and its operational readiness translated into decisive outcomes during Operation Sindoor.
“We must now move on from experimentation to enterprise-scale impact at a much faster pace in AI, cyber, quantum, autonomous systems, space, and advanced materials,” he added.
