Defence Day
public holiday in Pakistan
Defence Day (Urdu: یومِ دفاع ALA-LC: Yaum-i Difāʿ IPA: [jɔːm-e d̪ɪfɑː]) is celebrated in Pakistan as a national day to commemorate the sacrifices made by Pakistani soldiers in defending its borders. The date of 6 September marks the day in 1965 when Indian troops crossed the international border to launch an attack on Pakistani Punjab in a riposte to Pakistan's Operation Grand Slam targeting Jammu. While it is officially commemorated as an unprovoked surprise attack by India, repulsed by the Pakistan Army despite its smaller size and fewer armaments, the narrative has been criticised by Pakistani commentators as representing false history and propaganda.
Context of the 1965 War
The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 began with Pakistan sending Mujahideen into the Kashmir Valley to incite rebellion and dislocate local installations. In the second stage, on 1 September, it launched a tank attack, dubbed Operation Grand Slam, towards the Akhnoor bridge in the Jammu Division. It was intended to be a "short and swift, fait accompli operation." According to scholar Shuja Nawaz, the Pakistani military intended to capture the Akhnoor bridge and swing towards Jammu to cut off India's communications with Kashmir Valley. The Pakistanis had ignored the Indian Prime Minister's (then Lal Bahadur Shastri's) warnings that India would retaliate against Pakistan if Kashmir were attacked.
On 6 September, according to its "pre-declared strategy" of riposte, the Indian Army crossed the international border in Punjab, intending to cut off the Grand Trunk Road near Lahore. Another Indian objective was to capture the Lahore Cantonment. The attack came as a surprise to the Pakistani commanders.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Defence Day” as public holiday in Pakistan. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as public holiday in Pakistan. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5251172. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Defence Day” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.