Indian President Ram Nath Kovind on Monday conferred the Vir Chakra, the nation's third-highest wartime military bravery award, upon Group Captain Abhinandan Varthaman.
The Indian Air Force officer is credited for shooting down a Pakistani F-16 jet from his MiG-21 Bison during an aerial dogfight over the Jammu and Kashmir region in February 2019.
Varthaman was awarded the gallantry medal at the presidential palace (Rashtrapati Bhawan), at an investiture ceremony.
The Indian fighter pilot was part of Srinagar-based 51 Squadron of the Indian Air Force on 27 February, 2019, when he was deployed to chase away intruding Pakistan Air Force (PAF) F-16 jets which had crossed over into the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.
After a brief dogfight, Varthaman claims to have shot down one of the F-16 jets.
However, his plane was also hit in the process, following which it veered into the Pakistan-administered region of Kashmir before crash landing there.
Varthaman safely ejected from his crashed jet and was subsequently taken into custody by the Pakistani military on 27 February.
After being interrogated, Varthaman was released to the Indian side at the Wagah Border on 1 March.
Pakistan has denied that it lost an F-16 jet.
A 4 April 2019 report in the American publication Foreign Policy quoted senior American “defence officials” as stating that no Pakistani jet was missing in PAF’s F-16 fleet after the encounter with India.
India, however, has stayed firm on its claim.
The Pakistani fighter jet intrusion was in response to Indian air strikes inside Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on 26 February 2019.
New Delhi claims that its jets struck terrorist training camps operated by the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) near the town of Balakot.
Pakistan, for its part, denies the claims, by stating that Indian jets hit empty patches of land and returned to their bases in India. Islamabad even invited a team of foreign journalists to the site of Indian aerial bombing to back up its claims.
India carried out the cross-border air strikes, the first for the country during peacetime, in response to a terrorist attack on a paramilitary convoy in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February, 2019. The attack, claimed by JeM, left 40 troopers from India’s Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) dead.