January 22, 2025

Referring to the recent skirmish in the skies when aged Indian fighter planes managed to thwart the Pakistani attempts to infiltrate into India and target military installations, when Prime Minister Modi said that Rafale aircrafts would have given better results, he did not – could not – have meant that India failed to push back the Pakistani F-16s and other combat aircrafts. What the Prime Minister simply tried to prove was that if India could thwart the Pakistanis with their old generation fleet, imagine what would have been achieved if the Rafales were in service.

Yet, such is the hatred for the man in the opposition parties and a section of the media that people started saying that it means that India failed in the skirmish. First Rahul Gandhi said that it was Modi who was responsible for the delay in getting the Rafale. He tweeted that “you are why brave IAF pilots like Wing Cdr. Abhinandan are risking their lives flying outdated planes”. Could anything be further from the truth? From 2004 to 2014, the moribund UPA governments in both their first and second terms did not take any decisions to modernize the armed forces and brought the country to the position it is in now. Still, Rahul has the cheek to respond to Modi’s statement. Does Rahul seriously believes that the plight of Indian armed forces stems from Modi's five-year rule? Why is he trying to reclaim his Pappu image after assiduously working to get rid of it?

More shamefully, ignoring proof of the tactical and valiant moves by the IAF pilots, a section of the Indian media highlighted a tweet by Imran Khan’s party Tehreek-E-Insaf which claimed that PM Modi admitted that Pakistan outmaneuvered the IAF and that PM Modi had admitted defeat. That section of the media did not refute the claims of the Pakistani party, choosing instead to gloat over how the Rafale statement “blew up” in Modi’s face.

There are three ways a healthy situation can be described – good, better and best. By saying that Rafale would have given better results, Modi just meant that although IAF did well with the resources at their command, they would have produced better results if they had flown Rafale jets. It was a clear statement that showed that the UPA had done immense harm to India by sitting on files crying for the modernization of the armed forces and that if work was done then, we could have had better results now. Hatred for Modi cannot hide the fact that UPA I & II worked with wrong priorities and a major part of the work they did was just to loot the nation.