ISLAMABAD – Shooting down of PAF F – 16 by IAF, India faces a humiliatingblow from top US expert over the false claims.
Christine Fair – an expert on South Asian political and military – hasruled out the possibility that India had shot down a Pakistani F-16 inFebruary this year.
Fair, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, U.S.,stirred up a heated debate while speaking at a session on “Understandingthe message of Balakot” alongside former Air Chief BS Dhanoa and otherIndian experts at the Military Literature Festival in Chandigarh onSaturday.
She stated that the Indian Air Force (IAF) story of the operation and itsaftermath was based on ‘dubious’ claims, and disputed the debris used asevidence to back claims of the F-16 being shot down.
She said the Pakistan aircraft did not have GE engines whereas some Indianexperts had claimed that the debris of GE engines had been recovered.
She went on to assert that she did not believe India shot down an F-16fighter during the dogfight between Indian and Pakistani jets in theaftermath of the Indian airstrikes over Balakot. Fair rejected the claimbut admitted that Indian airplanes carried out strikes inside Pakistan.
Fair, whose work on Pakistan is frequently cited by the Indian side, tookon former air chief BS Dhanoa, stating that the IAF was not based on anempirical body of facts but dictated more by “things deployed bypoliticians to win elections”.——————————
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Amidst some interruptions from the audience – comprising mostly retired andserving defence officers – Fair went on to allege that the video of thepurported F-16 going down in Pakistani territory and Punjabi speakingvillagers talking about a pilot having crashed there, shared extensively onsocial media, was “fake”.
She maintained that “India has lost a lot of credibility in the ways thatcertain images have been deployed through social media that do not showwhat they show, with the level of certainty that is asserted.”
Fair also questioned India’s claim of extensive damage to what it said the“terror camp” in Balakot based on images from open sources, saying thatfrom an international point of view, these have not been accepted.
“They are refuted by many scholars who are actually India’s friends.
