With the BJP leadership tom-tomming their hawkish national security credentials by repeatedly invoking the 28/29 September 2016 ‘surgical strike’, former Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, in an interview on 2 May to Hindustan Times, asserted that “multiple surgical strikes took place during our tenure too. For us, military operations were meant for strategic deterrence, and giving a befitting reply to anti-India forces, than to be used for vote garnering exercises.”

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