NEW DELHI — At 6:41 pm on February 27, as the fate of captured fighter pilot Abhinandan Vartaman dominated the newscycle, the Indian Air Force released a quiet three line press release:On 27 February 2019, one Mi-17 V5 helicopter of Indian Air Force got airborne from Srinagar airfield at 1000 hrs for a routine mission. “Nothing to see here.”Just some routine deaths that routinely happen on a routine sortie. These six deaths, the IAF press release and most of the media wanted us to believe, were in no way related to the Air Force led operation along the Line Of Control, where the Pakistan Air Force had shot down an Indian MiG 21 and captured its pilot. Yet surely no Air Force sortie in Kashmir, on a morning when the Indian and Pakistan Air Force are literally shooting each other’s jets out of the sky, can be described as entirely “routine.” So why is the Air Force so determined to distance this one helicopter flight from everything that happened in Kashmir that day? Air Vice Marshal RGK Kapoor sat beside Kumar; he must have known that his men were dead — many in the media already knew.

Source: Huffington Post February 28, 2019 13:18 UTC