Book Review
Someshwar, Manreet Sodhi. (2013). The
Hunt For Kohinoor. Westland Ltd. Chennai. Pages: 425. Price Rs. 295/-
In
the aftermath of the event which has come to be known as 9/11 since then,
the phrase ‘asymmetric warfare’ was popular and in vogue for about a
decade. If for Carl von Clausewitz warfare was an extension of politics by ‘other
means’, for the terrorist, asymmetric warfare was the policy. But there
is a difference. For von Clausewitz politics was for national interest and
nation building. For the terrorist, asymmetric warfare was a means to
achieve an ill-defined cause, religion for example.
Other
nations like Israel, and India had been victims of terror. But till 9/11,
the US has been oblivious to the threat and convinced of its own invincibility
might have been a tad patronizing to the victims of terror. By the time the US
woke up to realize it was not immune to the terror threat after all, India had
had several bouts of it, including separatist insurgencies in the northeastern
states, Naxalite insurgency in the east-central corridor, the Khalistani
movement and lastly the violence in Kashmir that forced 500000 Hindus into
‘internal exile’. In most cases the insurgencies were externally engineered and
fuelled by exploiting internal fault lines but Kashmir was different.
Montgomery Meigs, a retired General of the
US Army, reviewing ten centuries of jehadi terrorism, wrote in 2003 that “Actually, al Qaeda’s
overall strategy is not new. … Today,
only the mechanism of attack has changed.”
The mechanism of attack has indeed changed. It is to deliver a
spectacular blow to the perceived common enemy designated as the kaffir (infidel). The destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001 falls in the
category.
Saudi Arabia, home to the most radicalized
form of Islam, known as Wahabism is generally known to be the financier
of international terrorism, and Pakistan the supplier of operatives.
However the nineteen member team that brought down the twin towers of the World
Trade Centre in 2001 was drawn from nine nations.
When Frederick Forsyth wrote The Afghan (2006), a second
spectacular strike (after 9/11) was only in the realm of speculation.
But it did take place, not in the west as everyone supposed it might be
attempted, but on India. The attack on Mumbai, India’s financial capital in
2008 was achieved with the help of a number of ‘sleeper modules’.
Youngsters are indoctrinated to such an
extreme degree of hatred (of the infidel) that they not only perpetrate
mass murder without the slightest of qualms but are willing to self-destruct
themselves in the process. These youngsters are infiltrated into the
unsuspecting enemy nation where they merge into the mosaic of society so
unobtrusively that it is impossible to detect. They lay in wait like a snake ready to strike when called to so. In intelligence parlance, they are known as
sleeper modules. In his The Kill List (2013) Forsyth portrayed the
indoctrination of ‘waiting snakes’ and how they were deployed to cause havoc
among unsuspecting societies.
It is not even whispered due to a skewed
sense of political correctness, but Indian intelligence agencies are aware of
the sleeper cells that exist in India and the availability of potential candidates
to carry out terror operations.
Apart from the international terror matrix that
bedevils the world, there is an India specific threat that resides in its neighbourhood
and engineered by its sworn enemy, Pakistan. The threat is ever present. It has
been ‘bleeding India through a thousand cuts’. Deciding that it cannot
wrest Kashmir through warfare, Pakistan has resorted to the more
insidious mode of asymmetric warfare. The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT),
the deadly India-specific terrorist organisation is a creation of its
intelligence agency, the ISI. However, as Hillary Clinton, the American
Secretary of State advised Pakistan, she could not harbour a snake hoping it
would bite only her enemies. While the asymmetric warfare unleashed
against India is denting the economic progress of Jammu & Kashmir, which Pakistan,
ostensibly professes to rescue, it is bleeding itself out.
It was in the reign of Atal Behari Vajpayee
that an attempt to bring about a rapprochment between India and
Pakistan was mooted. His opposite number in Pakistan at the time was General
Musharaf. The aborted Agra summit (2001) between Vajpayee and Musharaf is too
well-known.
In her novel, Manreet Sodhi Someshwar sets the summit in Kargil
instead of in Agra. It was the culmination of ‘Operation Karakoram’ a
series of high level talks designed to find a solution to the vexed,
decades-old problem. As proof of his bona fides Gen. Zaidi, the
Pakistani President was to hand over secret documents (which he codenamed Kohinoor)
that would help the Indian Prime Minister avert the next big terror
attack on India. However the summit was sabotaged from the Pakistani side and
the general assassinated as he descended from his helicopter. In the attack, an
ace Indian Intelligence agent, Harinder Singh Khosa, popularly known as Harry
was seriously wounded.
Harry, an
undercover agent of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was tasked to halt ISI
patronage to Khalistani terrorists. As head of the CIT-Z (counter
intelligence team Z, where ‘Z’ means Zamzama the large bore cannon
mentioned by Rudyard Kipling in his Kim) team, he brilliantly carried
out the operation forcing the ISI to call for a meeting with RAW. A little
after the operation, as Harry was in a joint operation with the Afghan
intelligence agency KHAD, he was wounded in the head by a rock splintered and
dislodged by a mortar shell. The knock made him unconscious for several days,
but when he woke up, he lost a part of his memory. He forgot about his family
of wife and daughter. Harry regained the memory when he was wounded in
the head for a second time at the sabotaged summit meeting between the Indian
Prime Minister and the Pakistani President Gen. Zaidi. Although he regained his
memory, he was critically wounded and in no fit condition to travel for a while
and undertake a mission.
Jag Misra, head of the Pakistan desk in RAW
and Harry’s boss recruits his daughter Mehrunnisa, an art historian by
profession to stand in to finish the mission. Mehrunnisa born to a Sikh husband
and his Iranian Muslim wife has drop-dead looks and is fluent in several
languages. Eventually,
consumed as much by patriotic zeal as he was by fatherly love, Harry overcomes the
anguish of a pain-wracked body to join the ‘hunt for Kohinoor’. What follows is, as the blurb says ‘a spine-chilling ninety-six
hour hunt through the world’s most dangerous terrain’.
The Hunt For Kohinoor portrays a diabolical plot that is far more deadly in its sweep
than the WTC bombing or even the 2008 attack on Mumbai.
