India-Pakistan cricket matches are considered a kind of proxy for war between the two countries, both now equipped with nuclear warheads.
The contentious border between the two, especially the Line of Control (LoC) running through Kashmir, was named by former U.S. President Bill Clinton as the “most dangerous place in the world.”
Books about this visceral conflict are usually restricted to memoirs by retired generals, foreign policy mavens and correspondents of foreign media organisations.
In fiction, there has been a notable paucity of any engagement with the subject despite the fact that it has all the ingredients of a blockbuster. There could be many reasons for that, not least the fact that thrillers in English have been written by English speaking people about wars that they have fought in or conflicts that they care about, such as West Asia and Afghanistan.
Shiv Aroor’s Operation Jinnah steps in to what can be termed a genre-in-the-making, of thrillers set in the subcontinent and with protagonists drawn from there.
The book starts with an aborted nuclear attack by the Indian government on Pakistan in retaliation to the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. It then cuts to the present time, to Kashmir, where three friends on a holiday face a terror attack that kills two of them and results in the abduction of the third.
The abducted girl is the daughter of the chief of the Indian Navy, whom the kidnappers have a score to settle with.
This starts off a rollercoaster ride of a rescue act, with two female special forces officers, snappy dialogues, and a granular look at the military and political drama that unfolds as the abduction becomes a diplomatic crisis.
Even those not especially enamoured of military jargon and details of weaponry (like this reviewer) will be held by the fast-paced narrative and the author’s demonstrable mastery of his subject, details and plot.
In the backdrop of one of the most tense military stand-offs in the world, Operation Jinnah delivers the first of Indian fiction’s military heroes and heroines.
