New Delhi: During the Rajasthan polls, Congress president Rahul Gandhi claimed that there were three surgical strikes during the UPA regime but the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh kept it a secret on the request of the Army.

However, Army troops who took part in one of the cross-border actions, codenamed Operation Ginger in July 2011, contradicted the Congress president's claims. He said that the attack on a particular Pakistani position close to the border was carried out at a local level on the instructions of the then Army chief Gen VK Singh, without involving the defence ministry or the Prime Minister's Office at any point of time.

The attacks on the Pakistani soil were carried out by the men close to the LoC on the Pakistani side, but neither the troop deployment nor the level of destruction was anywhere close to the surgical strikes carried out by the Modi government in September 2016 attacks on the Uri brigade.

"After the Pakistanis carried out a BAT action against our troops, there were clear instructions from the then Army chief to carry out the attacks where certain members of the top secret spy team Technical Support Division (TSD) were also involved in the attack," Army sources who took part in the operations told MyNation.

The top secret spy team had prepared the explosives which were used for trapping Pakistani soldiers, who later came to retrieve the dead bodies of their fellow soldiers, they said.

However, the sources clarified that the commanders at different levels did not take permission from the government at the Centre to carry out the offensive.

However, the surgical strikes in September 2016 were carried out along an arch of over 100 kilometres along the Line of Control (LoC) involving more than two units of the Para (special forces) and the units whose soldiers were killed in the Uri attack.

In the Op Ginger, the Indian side managed to kill eight Pakistani soldiers while in the surgical strikes, it is estimated that the troops managed to kill more than 35 Pakistani soldiers and terrorists in the operations which went on for almost six hours in the night of September 28-29.

Army sources said that in the period before the surgical strikes, for many years as part of revenge taken for beheading or killing of own soldiers by Pakistanis, none of the attacks have been at such a large scale and level.