Recently, Chief of Army Staff General Upendra Dwivedi revealed something extraordinary about Operation Sindoor, a revelation that cut through the noise of hyper-partisan commentary and reminded India what its military truly stands for. Speaking at the Ran Samvad 2026 forum in Bengaluru and separately on the podcast Before I Became Me, the Army Chief disclosed that during the cross-border strikes against terror camps in Pakistan, the Indian Armed Forces deliberately chose their strike windows to avoid the hours of namaz.
His words were plain and powerful: “When we were to destroy these targets, the timing was two o’clock, four o’clock, anytime. But we made sure that when the people on the other side were going through their namaz prayer in the terrorist camp, we said this time will not touch, because sabka malik ek hai.”
That single phrase, sabka malik ek hai, “there is one God for all”, echoed with the timeless wisdom of Shirdi Sai Baba, and in one sentence distilled the moral architecture of the Indian soldier. This is what separates a professional army from a mercenary horde: the ability to be lethal without being hateful, to destroy the enemy’s capacity for violence without desecrating his capacity for prayer.
Within hours, social media became a battlefield of its own. Sections of the political commentariat were outraged, some hawks argued that this amounted to operational softness, that showing consideration for the enemy’s prayer schedule was a strategic liability. The irony was exquisite. Here was a man who had commanded the Northern Command, who had overseen operations along the most militarised border on Earth, being told by armchair strategists that he didn’t understand warfare. The outrage reveals a deeper ignorance, an ignorance of the very civilisational ethos that India’s armed forces carry into battle. The Bhagavad Gita, the most revered treatise on duty and warfare ever composed, does not teach savagery. It teaches dharm yudh, righteous war fought with moral clarity.
Sukha-duḥkhe same kṛtvā lābhālābhau jayājayau |
Tato yuddhāya yujyasva naivaṃ pāpam avāpsyasi ||
“Treating happiness and sorrow, gain and loss, victory and defeat alike, then fight. You shall incur no sin.”
This is the heart of the Indian warrior’s dharma. Krishna does not ask Arjuna to fight with rage; He asks him to fight with equanimity. General Dwivedi’s decision to spare the hours of prayer was not weakness, it was the samabhāva(equanimity) that Krishna demands of the true kṣatriya. The targets were destroyed. The mission was accomplished. But the soul of the army remained untarnished.
Sarva-bhūta-stham ātmānaṃ sarva-bhūtāni cātmani |
Ikṣate yoga-yuktātmā sarvatra sama-darśanaḥ ||
“The one who is united in consciousness sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self, seeing the same everywhere.”
This is the philosophical foundation of sabka malik ek hai. It is not naive pacifism; it is the recognition that even the enemy is animated by the same divine spark. You eliminate the threat. You do not defile the sacred. This is what makes a yoddha (warrior) different from a butcher.
The Īśā Upaniṣad opens with a verse that could have been written for this moment:
Iśāvāsyam idaṃ sarvaṃ yat kiñca jagatyāṃ jagat |
Tena tyaktena bhuñjīthā mā gṛdhaḥ kasya svid dhanam ||
“All that exists in this moving world is enveloped by the Lord. Enjoy through renunciation. Do not covet what belongs to another.”
The Indian Army did not covet the prayer hours of its enemy. It did not seek to maximise humiliation. It struck with surgical intent and moral clarity, and in doing so honoured the oldest instruction of Indian civilisation: that the divine pervades all, even the adversary, even the battlefield.
The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (3.1.4) further illuminates:
Satyena labhyas tapasā hy eṣa ātmā
“This Self is attained through truth and discipline.”
The discipline General Dwivedi described, the discipline to hold fire during prayer and then strike with full force at the chosen hour , is precisely the tapas the Upanishads extol. Restraint is not the absence of power. It is power governed by wisdom.
General Dwivedi’s revelation also underscores something that India’s civil discourse has increasingly forgotten: the Indian military is the most secular institution in the Republic. In a foxhole, no one asks a fellow soldier’s religion. The langar of a military mess serves everyone the same food. The regimental prayer halls, called Sarva Dharma Sthal, house symbols of every faith side by side.
When the Army Chief said sabka malik ek hai, he was not making a political statement. He was stating a regimental fact. This is the lived ethic of a force where a Muslim officer leads a Sikh regiment, where a Hindu jawan is evacuated by a Christian medic, where the battle cry of the Gorkhas sits alongside the Sat Sri Akal of the Sikh Light Infantry. The Army does not need lessons in secularism from those who have never served.
General Dwivedi did not apologise for the strike. He did not hesitate in execution. He destroyed the terror infrastructure that had taken twenty-six innocent lives in Pahalgam. And while doing so, he ensured that the Indian Army remained what it has always been, a force that fights with fury but never without honour.
General Dwivedi arose. He struck. He prevailed. And he did it all without losing his soul. That’s a man secure in his moral authority.
And that is the mark of a true Senāpati. That is the Indian way of war.
Think about it.
Jai Hind
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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