Even as India remains tight-lipped on the extent of loss it suffered during the military confrontation with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack, media reports had claimed that one Rafale aircraft had been downed during the operation.
Given the air superiority of the state-of-the-art French-made jets, those reports had also raised questions about the effectiveness of Western hardware against Chinese alternatives.
However, a recent Reuters report claimed that the problem was not with Rafale, but an intelligence failure concerning the range of the China-made PL-15 missile, which resulted in the downing of the aircraft.
The faulty intelligence gave the Rafale pilots a false sense of confidence that they were out of Pakistani firing distance, which they believed was only around 150 km, the news agency reported, quoting an Indian official.
Justin Bronk, an air warfare expert at London's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank, claimed that the PL-15 that hit the Rafale was fired from around 200km away, according to Pakistani officials, and even farther, according to Indian officials.
Last month, Dassault Aviation Chairman and CEO Eric Trappier had reportedly said that no Rafale was shot down during the combat, but admitted that India had lost one jet due to a technical failure.
Dassault Aviation is the manufacturer of the highly sophisticated warplanes.
Reuters, in its report, quoted a few Pakistani officials as saying that Islamabad had developed a system called Data Link 17, which allowed its J-10s flying closer to India to obtain radar feeds from the surveillance plane cruising further away.
India has not yet confirmed the loss of Rafale, but asserted that no soldier had been killed or injured in the operation.
Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chouhan last month said India did lose some fighter jets, but New Delhi changed its tactics to inflict major damage on airbases deep across the border. He, however, didn’t mention Rafale or specify the exact number of jets India had lost.
During the recent debate in parliament on Operation Sindoor, Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi sought to know how many Rafale jets were shot down during the combat.
“There are just 35 Rafale jets in India, and if some of them have been downed, I think it is a big loss,” he said.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, however, skirted the opposition’s question, saying it does not represent India’s national interests. “They have not asked how many enemy aircraft our armed forces shot down,” he said.
India launched Operation Sindoor, the military campaign against the terrorist hubs in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, on May 7, weeks after terrorists ambushed a tourist spot in Pahalgam and killed 26 people, mostly tourists, after verifying their religious identity.
