Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Operation SINDOOR by Lt Gen K.J.S. Dhillon

The night I began Operation SINDOOR, the house was quiet in that fragile way silence gets after the news has exhausted itself. The phone lay face down. Outside, a distant train horn stitched the darkness together. I didn’t open the book expecting drama. I opened it expecting clarity. What I didn’t expect was to feel as if I’d stepped into a low-lit operations room where time moves in half-seconds and every choice leaves a residue.

Lt Gen K.J.S. Dhillon doesn’t write like someone trying to impress you. He writes like someone who has already lived the consequences of being wrong. That difference matters. From the first pages, the narrative carries the weight of professional restraint — measured, disciplined, almost austere. There is no cinematic swagger here. No indulgence in myth. The prose is functional, yes, but it is also deliberate, shaped by an understanding that language itself can escalate or contain.

The book circles the April 22, 2025 Pahalgam attack like a wound you cannot look away from. The details are known, yet reading them here feels different. Perhaps because Dhillon refuses to reduce the victims to statistics. Newlyweds, parents, solo travellers — lives interrupted mid-sentence. The valley’s beauty does not soften the horror; it sharpens it. The emotion sits quietly on the page, never exploited, never dramatized, but impossible to ignore.

What follows is not a revenge story. That is one of the book’s most important interventions. Operation SINDOOR emerges not as an impulsive roar but as a calibrated response shaped by data, intelligence, and strategic patience. Dhillon walks the reader through the anatomy of decision-making under uncertainty — how intelligence is always incomplete, how political authorization is layered, how every strike sends multiple messages at once. To the adversary. To citizens. To allies. To the world.

The title itself lingers like a symbol you can’t shake. Sindoor carries memory, continuity, loss. It risks moral overreach, and Dhillon seems aware of that danger. He handles the symbolism carefully, not as justification but as context. Military action, he suggests, does not exist in a vacuum. It reverberates through homes and histories. That awareness gives the narrative its moral tension.

One of the book’s strongest sections demystifies “deep strikes.” There are no miracle metaphors here. No illusion of surgical perfection. Instead, Dhillon presents constraint as the central character. Constraint of intelligence. Of escalation thresholds. Of international optics. Reading this, I felt how impoverished public debate often is — how quickly complexity is flattened into slogans. This book insists on a slower, harder kind of thinking.

The Pakistan dimension is treated with analytical sobriety. There is no cartoon villainy. The ISI appears as a persistent, adaptive institution — dangerous, yes, but not omnipotent. This refusal to caricature strengthens the narrative’s credibility. Deterrence here is not bravado; it is a fragile balance maintained through discipline.

Emotionally, my reading experience oscillated. Admiration for the professionalism and clarity. Unease at how normalized extraordinary force can become when wrapped in strategic language. The book does not resolve this discomfort, and that is its honesty. It acknowledges that restraint and aggression are not opposites but tools on the same continuum.

There are moments where institutional logic dominates, where dissent and skepticism feel distant. Dhillon writes from authority, not neutrality. A critical reader should remain alert. Yet his repeated emphasis on civilian oversight, political hesitation, and international pressure quietly dismantles the myth of the all-powerful general. Responsibility here is shared, but accountability remains personal.

What stayed with me most was the book’s meditation on sovereignty — not just territorial, but narrative. In a world where stories travel faster than facts, Operation SINDOOR becomes an act of strategic communication. It does not tell you what to think. It shows you how difficult thinking becomes when the stakes are real.

After finishing the book, I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt aware. Aware of how narrow the margin for error is. Aware of how much unseen labour goes into preserving a brittle peace. This is not a comforting read, but it is a necessary one. If you approach it with patience, it offers something rare: a narrative that respects complexity and trusts the reader to sit with it. Pick it up not for answers, but for reflection — and see what questions it leaves behind.

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