The Battle of Haji Pir: Inside the most iconic battle of the 1965 war

When Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar in August 1965, sending thousands of trained infiltrators across the Ceasefire Line (CFL), as the Line of Control was then known, into Jammu and Kashmir, it set off a chain of events that culminated in one of the most iconic battles in independent India's military history: the capture of the Haji Pir Pass.The operation was born out of a dangerously optimistic assessment at Pakistan Army headquarters in Rawalpindi. The plan, backed by then Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, assumed that Kashmir's population would rise in armed revolt as soon as Pakistani-trained fighters crossed the CFL. Bhutto is also alleged to have convinced President Ayub Khan that the incursions would not provoke India into widening the conflict to the international border.