India orders high-level inquiry after missile lands in Pakistan

Was it the Chinese HQ 9/P air defence system that tracked the unarmed Indian missile that landed deep inside Pakistan on Wednesday evening, asks senior journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi:Deeply regretting that an unarmed Indian missile, on a possible test flight, malfunctioned, and landed deep inside Pakistan, the Indian government ordered a high level inquiry on Friday. Expressing relief that no one was killed in the accident, a defence ministry statement said: “On 9 March 2022, in the course of a routine maintenance, a technical malfunction led to the accidental firing of a missile. The Government of India has taken a serious view and ordered a high-level Court of Enquiry.”

The Indian envoy was summoned by the Pakistan Foreign Office in Islamabad on Friday to register Pakistan's protest over the unprovoked violation and saying that such "irresponsible incidents" reflected India’s “disregard for air safety and callousness towards regional peace and stability”. Pakistan’s Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) on Thursday claimed that an Indian-origin ‘supersonic projectile’ violated Pakistani airspace for 3 minutes 44 seconds and hit Pakistani soil after traversing 124 km inside Pakistani territory.

In a hurriedly-convened press conference on Thursday night, Major-General Babar Iftikhar, ISPR director, said: “On March 9, at 6:43 PM, a high speed flying object was picked up inside the Indian territory by Air Defence Operations Centre of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF)… From initial course, it deviated and entered Pakistan territory and fell in Pakistani territory, causing some damage to civilian installations, but no loss of life was reported”.

But the real ISPR narrative lay in its details—that the ‘Indian projectile’ was tracked from its point of origin at Sirsa in Haryana till it fell in Mian Channu in the Khanewal district of Pakistan’s Punjab. The ISPR showed in a plotted map the exact route of the supposed ‘projectile’ beginning from Sirsa, moving towards the international border with Pakistan before suddenly swerving to the right and entering Pakistan.

But the message that Pakistan may be actually is about the efficacy of the Chinese-made HQ 9/P air defence and missile systems and that they are on the job. Pakistan is not known to possess any other notable tracking capability other than the state-of-the-art HQ 9/P HIMADS (High to Medium Air Defence System) that it had acquired from China and commissioned into the Pakistan Army Air Defence in mid-October, 2021.

An official release by ISPR had then said that the new air defence system “will significantly enhance comprehensive layered integrated air defence shield of aerial frontiers of Pakistan.” The ‘strategic, long-range surface-to-air missile’ HQ 9 is also deployed by Chinese PLA in Xinjiang to combat possible Indian incursions and attacks.

The HQ-9 air defence system is believed to be capable of intercepting multiple air targets including aircraft, cruise missiles and beyond visual range weapons at ranges over 100 km with single shot kill probability. The Pakistani description of the ‘supersonic projectile’ resembles that of India’s Brahmos missile being tested minus the warhead.

Incidentally, the Indian military issued a ‘area warning’ notification for airspace reservation for launch of an ‘experimental flight vehicle’ from 0530 hours of March 15 to 0930 hours of March 17 in the Bay of Bengal and for surface-to-surface missile launch in the Andaman seas from 0230 hours of March 22 to 1130 hours of March 24.