Context:
India is celebrating the 23th anniversary of the Kargil Vijay Diwas on 26th July 2022. On this day in 1999, the Kargil War, also known as the Kargil conflict, formally came to an end, with Indian soldiers successfully recapturing mountain heights that had been seized by Pakistani intruders.
Relevance:
GS-I History
Background: History of the conflict
- After the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, there had been a long period with relatively few direct armed conflicts involving the military forces of the two neighbours.
- During the 1990s escalating tensions and conflict due to separatist activities in Kashmir, as well as the conducting of nuclear tests by both countries in 1998, led to an increasingly belligerent atmosphere.
- Both countries signed the Lahore Declaration in 1999 promising to provide a peaceful and bilateral solution to the Kashmir conflict.
- During the winter of 1998–1999, some elements of the Pakistani Armed Forces were covertly training and sending Pakistani troops and paramilitary forces, into territory on the Indian side of the line of control (LOC).
- Initially the Indian troops in the area assumed that the infiltrators were jihadis.
- Subsequent discovery of infiltration elsewhere along the LOC, along with the difference in tactics employed by the infiltrators, caused the Indian army to realize that the plan of attack was on a much bigger scale.
The Government of India responded with Operation Vijay, a mobilization of 200,000 Indian troops. The war came to an official end on July 26, 1999, thus marking it as Kargil Vijay Diwas.
-Source: The Indian Express
