Union minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday criticised the “compulsive contrarians” who speculated about the location of India’s airstrikes on Tuesday morning, PTI reported. He wondered why the Indian Air Force would attack the Balakote in Indian territory – as several commentators had speculated.

Jaitley said at an event: “When our Air Force reached Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, before one could gather any information, someone started saying it is very close to the LoC [Line of Control] and some people whom I call compulsive contrarians discovered a new Balakote without even checking that, that particular Balakote is not across the LoC but in our own Poonch. Why will our own Air Force attack our own territory?”

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Early on Tuesday, Pakistan’s armed forces had claimed that the Indian Air Force had violated the Line of Control, days after a terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir. Spokesperson Major General Asif Ghafoor had tweeted that Indian aircraft had dropped payload “in haste while escaping, which fell near Balakot”.

With no official statement by India for four hours after Ghafoor’s tweet, there was speculation about which “Balakot” he had meant. If it was the Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, it meant Indian jets had not just crossed the Line of Control but had entered the neighbouring country. However, commentators pointed out that there was a “Balakote” village in Poonch district as well, which would mean India had stayed within its own territory.

Later, an official statement from India said the Air Force had struck the biggest camp of the terrorist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad in Balakot and had eliminated a “very large number” of terrorists and trainers. India called it a “non-military preemptive action”.

Jaitley had first used the phrase “compulsive contrarians” in January, when he said this new class of people had no qualms in “manufacturing falsehood” and who believed that the government could do no good.