Ten years ago, on the nights of 28–29 September 2016, Indian Army commandos crossed the Line of Control and dismantled terrorist infrastructure deep inside Pakistani territory — a move that stunned the world and rewrote India's counter-terrorism doctrine. Union Culture and Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat marked the decade milestone on Sunday with a tribute to the soldiers who carried out the operation.

Posting in Hindi on X, Shekhawat wrote: 'LOC के उस पार जाकर हमारे वीर जवानों ने जिस तरह आतंकवाद के खिलाफ कार्रवाई की थी, वो देख दुनिया हैरान थी' — 'The way our brave soldiers crossed to the other side of the LOC and struck against terrorism left the entire world astonished.' He tagged the post with #MannKiBaat, linking the anniversary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's monthly public-address programme.

The night India crossed the LoC

The strikes were the Indian government's direct response to the Uri attack of 18 September 2016, in which a militant assault on an Army brigade headquarters in Jammu and Kashmir killed 19 soldiers. Within ten days, special forces crossed the Line of Control in multiple sectors, targeting terror launch pads and destroying camps used to funnel militants into India. New Delhi publicly acknowledged the operation — a sharp break from decades of official silence around such actions.

The strikes were not merely a military event; they were a strategic signal. For the first time, India explicitly named cross-border counter-terrorism action as a policy instrument, abandoning the older posture of strategic restraint in favour of what officials called 'proactive' measures. The announcement reshuffled threat calculations across South Asia overnight.

A decade of changed calculus

In the ten years since, the 2016 Surgical Strikes have become a fixed reference point in India's national-security conversation — invoked during the 2019 Balakot air strikes, debated in parliament, and commemorated annually by serving officers and political leaders alike. They mark the moment India's security establishment moved from absorbing cross-border terrorism to actively punishing the infrastructure behind it.

Shekhawat's post, timed precisely to the eve of the anniversary and linked to Mann Ki Baat, fits a pattern of coordinated annual remembrance. The programme has previously been used by the Prime Minister to foreground national-security milestones and salute the armed forces — making the hashtag a deliberate bridge between civic communication and defence commemoration.

The soldiers who crossed the LoC that night did so without the world knowing their names. A decade later, the mission they carried out still anchors India's claim that it will not simply wait at its own border.