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From the intelligence lapses of Operation Blue Star to the accuracy of Operation Sindoor, India’s security architecture has changed dramatically.
File image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (Source: PTI)
There was a gap of 41 years between Operation Blue Star and Operation Sindoor.
In June 1984, the Indian Army entered the Golden Temple in Amritsar without any reliable assessment of what waited inside, and with a training plan that had already been leaked to the other side. In May 2025, India struck nine terrorist hideouts in Pakistan and PoK in less than thirty minutes – targets that had been monitored, mapped and kept in intelligence files for years before the political trigger came.
That distance is not accidental. This is four decades of institutional reconstruction, inspired by the failures of 1984, and the foundation on which Modi’s security doctrine is built – not invented by his government, but pioneered by him.
The state failed to read the movement
Bhindranwale’s movement did not launch an ambush attack on the Indian state. It grew in front of him. His rise in the late 1970s was at various points facilitated by Congress politicians who found him a convenient instrument against the Akali Dal. By July 1982, he had been invited to the Golden Temple complex by Akali Dal president Harchand Singh Longowal, and the government arrested him in September, only to release him two days later because no one had built the network to make a case.
Much of what happened inside the compound over the next two years was visible and, as far as the state intelligence apparatus was concerned, essentially unread. Major General Shahbeg Singh, a former Indian Army officer who had been court-martialed and had since transferred his knowledge of military strategy to the other side, was strengthening the Akal Takht with professional deliberations. Seventeen houses surrounding the compound were occupied as forward positions, about 800 yards apart, all in wireless contact with a command center inside.
Armor-piercing ammunition, RPG launchers with automatic weapons, prepared lines of fire through the streets – this was a defensive structure that was systematically built over months. The agencies responsible for monitoring the situation did not present any photographs that would show what was being constructed.
The Army, to its credit, had long been planning to build a full-scale replica of the temple complex at Chakrata Cantonment in the Doon Valley for commando training. This plan was canceled when it was leaked to the militants. The operational plan to become Blue Star had reached the enemy before even a single soldier had moved.
barefoot on the threshold
On the night of 5 June 1984, when soldiers of the 1st Para Regiment prepared to enter Harmandir Sahib, many of them took off their shoes. Soldiers going to war inside a temple, taking off their shoes at the door.
This is a detail that gets lost in the military and political accounting of Blue Star, but it says a lot about the impossibility of the operation. On the anniversary of the martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev, the army was sent to conduct a combat operation inside the holiest site of a major religion, stranding thousands of civilian pilgrims who had no connection with the insurgency. The force entrusted with this task, a conventional infantry formation trained for open terrain warfare, presented an intelligence picture that significantly underestimated the formation created by Shahbeg Singh.
The 1st Para Regiment entered through the main entrance and moved into prepared strike areas. The tanks brought in for high fire support had to be turned directly against Akal Takht to break the resistance. The army and its agencies had greatly underestimated the level of resistance inside the temple. The government’s own white paper recorded 554 combined terrorist and civilian deaths.
The Akal Takht, the temporary seat of Sikh religious authority, was left in ruins. On 31 October 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. After Blue Star, the Intelligence Bureau had reportedly expressed concerns about Sikh personnel in its security detail. No changes were made in its security arrangements. He was murdered in his own garden. The strategic objective of the operation to eliminate Bhindranwale was achieved. Everything collapsed around it.
reconstruction
Directly from the Blue Star analysis, the National Security Guard was formed on 16 October 1984. The question to be answered was this: Who do you call when the situation requires close-in counter-terrorism in a sensitive environment and you can’t send an armored infantry battalion? The NSG Act was passed in 1986, with the force based on the SAS and GSG-9.
The Rashtriya Rifles made long deployments to Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s because infantry units roaming the conflict zone for short periods could not build the human intelligence network on which counter-insurgency operations depend. By the early 1990s, this model, coupled with intelligence penetration of terrorist networks in Punjab, had begun to yield results that force alone could not.
As of 2014, India had a significantly different security architecture from 1984. Modi’s choice as National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, had spent years as an IB field officer in Punjab during exactly the same reconstruction period. He had seen what intelligence failure looked like and what patient intelligence work could yield. His appointment placed someone at the center of security decision-making who held that experience not as textbook history, but as professional memory.
What changed under Modi?
Previous governments had built capacity. Modi’s government decided to use it differently – openly, aggressively, and with the stated intention of changing the terms of engagement with Pakistan-backed terrorism.
The change was evident in how the 2016 surgical strikes were handled. On the night of 28–29 September, after an attack on Uri Army base killed 19 soldiers, Para Special Forces crossed the Line of Control and attacked four terrorist launch pads. This was not the first time that India had conducted a cross-LOC operation, but it was the first time that a government announced it publicly with an official briefing by the DGMO the next morning.
Northern Command was running human sources inside Hizbul Mujahideen, developing ground level intelligence on Pakistani camp layouts and movement corridors. The goals were known for years. What changed was the political decision to act on them and then say so.
Balakot on 26 February 2019 was a big step. Twenty Mirage 2000 jets attacked a Jaish-e-Mohammed training center in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. This was the first Indian air strike inside Pakistani territory since 1971. India’s official description was “intelligence-led, non-military and pre-emptive”. After Pulwama, the camp was kept under surveillance for more than several weeks.
Operation Sindoor, conducted on May 6-7, 2025, was the most extensive operation. Within thirty minutes nine locations in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir were attacked. Jaish-e-Mohammed infrastructure in Bahawalpur and Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen hideouts in Muzaffarabad and Kotli were targeted.
No Pakistani military assets were targeted – a deliberate limitation. The operation followed the April 22 Pahalgam attack in which 26 tourists were killed by Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen in Baisran Valley. But those nine targets were not developed in the two weeks between Pahalgam and the attack. India knew where to attack because intelligence had been collected over the years. The speed of response was a function of preparation, not immediacy.
Hours after Sindoora, before Pakistan’s details of the events were recorded in the public record, India briefed the media domestically and internationally. The National Security Council Secretariat coordinated the operation as well as the narrative. Compare this with 1984, when the army attacked and the government completely lost the political debate at home and abroad over the next few months.
where shortcomings remain
This account would be incomplete without Pahalgam and Burhan Wani, as both fall under the same government tenure and neither has a good impact on intelligence performance.
Wani had been openly building his following on Facebook and YouTube since 2015 – posting photographs in camouflage, videos from the jungle and direct recruitment appeals to Kashmiri youth. He was a well-known militant with a bounty on his head. When he was murdered in Anantnag on July 8, 2016, curfew was imposed in the valley for 53 consecutive days. More than 96 people lost their lives and more than 15,000 were injured. The open-source picture of Wani’s reach and influence was there. Reading it as an operational intelligence problem, and acting on that reading before the trigger was pulled, was not.
In April 2025, Pahalgam was in the worst condition in terms of civilian life. Intelligence had reportedly identified the movement of hybrid terrorists into South Kashmir a few weeks before the attack. Pahalgam and Sindoora came under the same government within a few weeks of each other. The theory is real. Similarly, there are shortcomings in its continuous implementation.
Blue Star’s enduring relevance
The failures of June 1984 were the result of an institution that lacked the right capabilities, that did not collect the right intelligence, and that did not think through what it meant to conduct a security operation inside a religious space that was politically flammable, where conventional military logic was entirely the wrong instrument.
India has spent forty years in improving it. The Modi government has been most active in implementing the revised version, and most willing to say so openly when it does so. The theory that has emerged is built on the premise that intelligence drives action, not the other way around.
Blue Star is where India learned what the cost of doing without it is. Pahalgam is a reminder that the text requires active maintenance. The notion of stability, when it replaces constant vigilance, always produces the same result – and 1984 is clear evidence of what that result looks like at its worst.
About the author
Vallari Parashar is Senior Deputy Editor at News18. She writes on geopolitics, defense and strategic affairs
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