NEW DELHI: Devendra Kumar Pathak did not get much sleep on the three nights he spent at the border in Jammu & Kashmir earlier this week. Besides being alongside his men inside border outposts as bullets rained across the frontier, the director-general of Border Security Force (BSF) got encouraging calls from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, exhorting him to return fire with fire.
Pathak, in the twilight of his long career in the Indian Police Service, much of which has been spent fighting terrorism and insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir and Assam, is now the man fighting Modi's 'war' with Pakistan on the international border. Although cross-border violations are nothing new, the sheer intensity has made many rate the ongoing skirmish as the worst in a decade.
And much of the action this time has been along the international border, which BSF guards, rather than the Line of Control (LoC) overseen by the army.
"We have decided we will give Pakistan a thrashing for their misadventure this time. We have given them a very solid pounding and the loss on the other side is very heavy," Pathak told ET on Friday. "We have fired many more times the rounds Pakistan has fired. They have been silenced."
