Former Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan (retd) tried this week to put to rest one of the most persistent rumours to come out of last year’s India-Pakistan conflict — whether an Indian strike hit Kirana Hills, an area near Sargodha widely believed to house Pakistani nuclear-related infrastructure. Instead, going by the flurry of fresh speculation his remarks have triggered, he may have simply given the theory a second wind.
Speaking at the ‘VIMARSH’ event on Operation Sindoor hosted by the Vivekananda International Foundation, Gen Chauhan said an Indian loitering munition — reportedly an Israeli-designed Harop drone — had been sent toward Sargodha to hunt for Pakistani radar installations during the 87-hour operation last year. He explained that such munitions have a limited flight window of roughly two hours, and if they fail to find a target, they come down and strike wherever they happen to be. “It must have come and hit one of those hills,” he said, adding that Pakistani media had shown images of smoke rising from the Kirana Hills area around that time.
Gen Chauhan’s account backed the position taken during the conflict itself by Air Marshal A.K. Bharti, then Director General of Air Operations, who had brushed aside questions about the site at a May 2025 briefing, telling reporters India had not targeted Kirana Hills and hadn’t even been aware of any nuclear installation there. According to Gen Chauhan, that line remains the official and accurate one: the hit, if it happened, was an accident of a drone running out of fuel — not a decision to strike a sensitive nuclear-linked site.
Why nobody quite believes that’s the whole story
The trouble for the “it was just a wandering drone” explanation is the sound. Open-source video analysts and defence commentators have pointed out that the audio captured just before the reported impact doesn’t much resemble the low buzz of a piston-engine loitering munition — it sounds faster, sharper, more like a supersonic weapon. That has fed theories, so far unconfirmed by any official source, that the strike may actually have involved something considerably more potent, such as a BrahMos cruise missile or a Rampage air-launched weapon, rather than a drone quietly running out of battery over the wrong hill.
Commentators have also pointed to the sequence of events that followed: a ceasefire arriving in short order, reports (unverified) of a U.S. aircraft associated with radiation monitoring turning up in the region, and separate reports of boron shipments to Pakistan — boron being a material used in radiation-absorbing shielding. None of this amounts to proof of anything, and no government has confirmed any of it. But taken together with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public remarks at the time warning against “nuclear blackmail,” it has been enough to keep alive a theory that India may have deliberately signalled — via a strike near a sensitive site — that no target was off-limits, without ever having to say so out loud.
The official line holds, for now
For its part, the Indian government has offered no version of events beyond Gen Chauhan’s and Air Marshal Bharti’s: an accident, not a message. Gen Chauhan himself has been careful to frame his remarks as an explanation of what “must have” happened, not a confirmation of intent. Whether that closes the file on Kirana Hills or simply adds a new, more detailed rumour to the pile depends on who’s asking — and, if the last few days are any indication, plenty of people are still asking.
