New Delhi:
At 1.05 am on a May night one year ago, an Indian missile punched through the roof of a hangar at Bholari airfield deep inside Pakistan. Inside, almost certainly, was a Swedish-built airborne early warning aircraft, one of the most sophisticated platforms in the Pakistani Air Force’s inventory. The people who planned that strike knew the aircraft operated from Bholari. They did not know at the moment of impact whether it was inside but found out later.
Air Marshal Narmdeshwar Tiwari (retired) was the Vice Chief of the Air Staff during Operation Sindoor. He retired a few months ago. On the first anniversary of the operation, he discussed with NDTV’s Vishnu Som a target-by-target walkthrough including what India actually struck and what it was prepared to strike next.
Muridke and Bahawalpur were assigned specifically to the IAF because they sat deeper inside Pakistani territory than the targets assigned to the Indian Army, Air Marshal Tiwari said.
“Muridke was about 25 to 30 km inside the border and Bahawalpur was almost 100 km inside,” he said, referring to locations that served as terror infrastructure. Muridke was the headquarters for Lashkar-e-Taiba and Bahawalpur for Jaish-e-Mohammed.
“One of the first things that you look at is up to date intelligence. Things change over a period of time. We maintain a lot of target folders, but we need to keep them updated,” Air Marshal Tiwari said, adding the planners also took care to minimise collateral damage. “Both these targets are very close to civilian areas. We hit the main administrative blocks. We also ensured that adjacent areas were left untouched.”
At Jacobabad, what was once a maintenance hangar for F-16 fighter jets now shows a small entry signature on the roof. There’s near-total destruction inside, Air Marshal Tiwari said.
“We are very certain that four to five aircraft have been lost in this hangar. The kind of damage it causes inside is tremendous. So I’m sure whatever was inside this hangar would have been totally destroyed. We are talking of 250 to 300 kg of weapons-grade explosives,” Air Marshal Tiwari said.
At Sakhar, deep inside Pakistan, two large hangars used to house Pakistani drones, and both sites were among India’s primary targets. “We took it out on the early morning of May 10,” the retired officer said. These same drones had spent several days in early May last year trying to saturate India’s air defences unsuccessfully.
At Sargodha, the IAF struck not once but twice, hitting the intersection of a taxiway and runway, then again further down the main runway. The idea was to disable both runways simultaneously, Air Marshal Tiwari said. Pakistan’s aircraft had already been getting airborne from Sargodha that morning, attempting strikes on Indian bases, but India was already watching on its IACCS or the Integrated Air Command and Control System network.
“We were very sure that this is one of the targets that we need to take out,” he said.
At Murid Airbase, a satellite erground facility’s entry point. Black scarring across the surrounding area suggested an explosion that worked from inside out.
“This is one of the command and control centres. It’s an underground complex. The bomb has actually penetrated and impacted inside and has caused some significant damage there,” Air Marshal Tiwari said.
The strikes’ accuracy was within five metres in several cases, made possible by teamwork, he said.
“You can have a precision weapon which can go 300, 400 km away. But the backchannel effort that goes into making this weapon hit accurately is a tremendous amount of teamwork on the ground. It’s not just the weapon. There is a lot of work which has to be done on the ground,” he said.
The date and time of the Operation Sindoor strikes were revealed to a group of seven or eight people and Air Marshal Tiwari was one of them.
“By the time the decision was taken that we have to go for a kinetic option, I think we were all already prepped up,” he said. Targets had been chosen, and weapons had been matched to aircraft and aimpoints.
“When the actual date and time was announced, it was more like validation of a culmination of something that we were already expecting.”
They had between 24 and 36 hours from that meeting to the first missile launch. On the morning of May 10 last year, as Pakistan signalled it was willing to come to the ceasefire table, IAF jets were already airborne moving toward their targets. They were recalled.
“Those are the targets we didn’t hit,” Air Marshal Tiwari said, without giving further details. Mobilisation was continuing even as the strikes were happening as the escalation ladder had rungs India had not yet climbed.
#LeftRightCentre | Operation Sindoor: The Real Story
Former IAF Vice Chief Air Marshal N Tiwari (R) joins NDTV’s @vishnundtv as they decode how India destroyed Pak terror pic.twitter.com/Vt9Vw7ZMjB
— NDTV (@ndtv) May 7, 2026
Air Marshal Tiwari said the lessons being drawn from Ukraine and the Middle East are being studied and analysed. “I had said it last time also, we are under no assumption or fallacy that the next operations will be like the last one. So we have to think anew and afresh.”
Based on recordings from the IACCS network which was corroborated with intelligence from multiple sources, 13 Pakistani aircraft were destroyed on the ground or in the air, Air Marshal Tiwari said.
“We want to be 100 per cent sure that we are credible,” he said.
