Indian military doubles down on PM Modi’s ‘radar evading cloud’ theory

With several top Indian military officials defending Narendra Modi’s claim that clouds might in a way have helped Indian jets evade Pakistani radar during their raid on Balakot, online vigilantes have again ridiculed the theory.

“Very strong clouds and very strong convective conditions in clouds prevent the radar from detecting very accurately,” the chief of Western Air Command, Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar said Monday, defending the controversial theory voiced by the Prime Minister earlier this month.

Sharing his ‘raw wisdom’ of air combat tactics, Modi claimed that bad weather conditions contributed to the success of the Balakot air strike against a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist camp deep inside Pakistani territory on February 26, because the clouds served as a shield from the enemy’s radar. While Twitter users found this logic puzzling, Air Marshal Nambiar was not the theory's only apologist within the Indian military.

“There are various kinds of radars working with different technologies. Some have the capacity to see through, some don't have the capacity to see through,” Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said over the weekend. “Some kinds of radar cannot see through clouds because of the manner in which it is operating. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't.”

Critics, however, immediately dismissed the explanation as ridiculous, claiming that any advanced military radar features all-weather capabilities and doesn’t stop working on cloudy days – despite the fact that in higher frequency radars, accuracy can indeed be affected by weather conditions.

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