What Government Told Parliamentary Panel On Surgical Strikes

New Delhi: On a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi compared the Indian Army's surgical strikes with the covert operations of the Israeli forces, officials of the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of External Affairs were briefing a group of Parliamentarians including Rahul Gandhi.

The Congress vice president didn't ask any question in the meeting but other members of the parliamentary panel on foreign affairs did.

They wanted to know from Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar and the Vice Chief of the Indian Army if the September 29 strikes were the first "cross border strikes."

Lawmakers on the foreign affairs panel claim that Mr Jaishankar accepted that strikes happened before but they have been made public for the first time.

Neither the foreign secretary nor the Vice Chief of the Army spoke with the media.

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But lawmakers say the government described the September 29 operations as "professionally done target specific low calibre counter terror operations."

Earlier though, Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar had stated that "there was now an element of unpredictability" in India's response to Pakistan sponsored terror.

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Opposition lawmakers, who were briefed today, avoided speaking on the meeting. But some of them reacted to Prime Minister Modi's most direct reference to the strikes today.

"The credit goes to men in uniform. Those who are guarding the borders and have successful and precisely done what was required to do," said Mohammed Salim of the CPIM and added, "It is not new as they were done earlier also. But for the first time, the RSS, the Defence Minister and now the Prime Minister has joined the bandwagon to usurp credit."