New Delhi: While India continues to battle Pakistan-perpetrated terrorism and cross-border infiltration along the international border, social media cashed in the opportunity, with some users impersonating the brave IAF pilot. Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman’s name is on everyone’s mind, lips and praises in India. The Indian Air Force pilot displayed exemplary courage, resilience and poise on being captured by Pakistani military on February 27 after an aerial combat with the Pakistan Air Force in the airspace over the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir last week.
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Ever since Varthaman was captured and his subsequent release on March 1, Twitter has run amok, with several fake profiles of the IAF pilot surfacing on the social media micro-blogging platform.Indian government sources issued a clarification on Sunday, stating that the accounts posting tweets in the name of Abhinandan Varthaman are fake, false and impersonated.Twitter handles ‘@Abhinandan_wc’, ‘@_pilotiaf’, ‘@WC_Abhinandan’, ‘@AbhiNandan_WCdr’ are some of the fake profiles created in the name of the IAF pilot. Some of them even have over 3000 followers, with several posts in English, Hindi and other vernacular languages.
Indian Air Force fighter jets on February 26 launched a major offensive against terrorist organisations using Pakistani soil to carry out terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir and annihilated training camps of the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Balakot that falls in the Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa region, along with Muzaffarabad and Chakothi in PoK. The terror group is responsible for the dastardly terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama on February 14 where 40 CRPF personnel were killed.
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However, the IAF attack was carried out by 12 Mirage 2000 fighter jets, ably aided by Sukhoi jets that provided cover throughout the operation, around 3:30 am. The payload dropped by the Indian Air Force weighed as much as 1000 kilogrammes.
The very next morning, Pakistan Air Force jets entered Indian airspace from Nowshera sector but were immediately sent back by IAF jets on February 27. Varthaman was released by Pakistan on March 1.
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