Islamabad, May 21: Pakistan Army chief General Asim Munir has been promoted to the topmost military rank of Field Marshal – an honour given only in the rarest of occasions and on achieving a stellar operations record throughout a career in the armed forces.

In a surprising, strangely-amusing decision, Pakistan’s Cabinet, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has ‘approved’ a proposal to promote the army chief. The announcement comes days after a series of military escalations against India, which began with the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam.

General Asim Munir’s inflammatory and shockingly-communal speech is widely considered as the trigger for the religiously-motivated Pahalgam terror attack – in which 26 civilians, all tourists, were shot dead in India for failing to pledge their allegiance to Islam.