Lt Gen K.J.S. “Tiny” Dhillon’s Operation SINDOOR: The Untold Story of India’s Deep Strikes Inside Pakistan offers a first-person, strategic narrative of India’s military response to the 22 April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack, situating the operation within the larger trajectory of India–Pakistan conflict and counterterrorism policy. Written by a former Director General Defence Intelligence Agency and Corps Commander of the Chinar Corps, with long experience in counterinsurgency in Kashmir and the North-East, the book combines operational detail, political–strategic framing and an explicit concern with narrative warfare, making it a significant primary source for the study of contemporary South Asian security.

The volume is anchored in the Baisaran Valley attack at Pahalgam, where heavily armed terrorists of The Resistance Front, a Lashkar-e-Taiba proxy reportedly backed by the Pakistan Army and ISI, killed 26 civilians and injured many more. The narrative underscores the attack’s symbolic and communal dimension: victims included Hindu tourists, a Christian who died protecting his family, and a local Muslim killed while rescuing others, while a Hindu professor survived by reciting the kalma —a pattern the author interprets as a deliberate attempt to rupture India’s inter-religious harmony.

India’s response, as narrated in the book, is Operation Sindoor, a joint air-dominated campaign designed to strike terror infrastructure at its source, including facilities at Bahawalpur and Muridke associated with Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba and launch pads in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The author’s stated objective is not merely to recount events, but to demonstrate how this operation reflects India’s military modernisation, technological maturity and evolving doctrine of calibrated yet firm cross-border responses under a nuclear overhang.

Structure and major themes

The analytical core of the narrative lies in three key sections: the “Four-Day War”, the battles along the Line of Control, and the chapter on strategic communication. The book follows what one critic terms a “reaction–counter-reaction” framework, presenting every Indian kinetic action as a measured counter to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism rather than as unilateral escalation. This framing is central to the author’s effort to legitimise Operation Sindoor in both domestic and international discourse.

Three major themes emerge

First, the book foregrounds India’s transition towards integrated, network-centric warfare. The Author highlights the role of precision weapons, drones, and layered air defence, arguing that Operation Sindoor marks a qualitative departure from the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot air raid in terms of depth, scale and technological sophistication.

Second, he emphasises the notion of “whole-of-state” mobilisation. Unlike earlier episodes that were largely framed as one-off military responses, Operation Sindoor is portrayed as a coordinated enterprise involving the armed forces, intelligence community, diplomatic apparatus and political leadership working in concert to punish, deter and manage escalation.

Third, the author devotes sustained attention to narrative warfare. The text discusses how media, social media and information operations are woven into operational planning, with the author highlighting efforts to control the story of the crisis and counter Pakistan’s and its partners’ attempts to shape global perceptions.

Operational and technological detail

For students of military operations, one of the book’s most valuable contributions lies in its account of the planning and execution of deep strikes in a heavily surveilled, nuclearized environment. The a\Author describes how air strikes targeted nine terrorist infrastructure sites in Pakistan and PoJK, with Indian sources noting the use of Rafale aircraft employing MBDA SCALP land-attack cruise missiles and Safran AASM Hammer guided bombs to engage high-value targets up to 150 kilometres inside Pakistani territory.

A recurring analytical motif is India’s layered air-defence architecture. Here too, the author’s commentary stresses the S-400 system’s role as an outer ring, integrated with other indigenous and imported systems to create a three-tier defensive envelope. This is tied together through the D4 (Detect, Deter, Destroy, Document) command-and-control and sensor-fusion system, developed domestically by DRDO and Bharat Electronics Limited, which the book presents as emblematic of India’s maturing high-technology defence ecosystem.

The book also documents Pakistan’s military and paramilitary responses. Gen. Dhillon describes ISI-assisted drone warfare using Chinese and Turkish platforms, intensified artillery and rocket fire against Indian military, civilian and religious sites, and the role of Chinese intelligence and information support in sustaining Pakistan’s efforts. This portrayal of India “fighting on three fronts”—Pakistan’s armed forces, external resupplies and intelligence assistance, and the global information domain—adds an important layer to understanding the complexity of escalation management in such crises.

Style and Analytical value

Gen. Dhillon writes with a commanding, declarative tone befitting a senior commander, yet generally avoids technical obscurity, enabling non-specialist readers with some interest in strategic affairs to follow the narrative. The juxtaposition of human stories from Pahalgam with higher-level planning discussions generates a dual register of empathy and analytical distance, which enhances the book’s effectiveness as both testimony and case study.

At the same time, the work is openly normative and national in orientation. Dhillon is explicit about Pakistan’s role as the sponsor of the Pahalgam attack and frames Operation Sindoor as a morally and strategically necessary response to an egregious provocation. The book celebrates India’s “justice delivery”, to use a phrase later echoed in official commentary, and argues that the operation redraws the “red lines” in India–Pakistan relations by signalling that deep-inland terrorist attacks will incur deep-strike punishment.

This approach yields clear strengths. The text provides rare, relatively detailed insight into the thinking of senior Indian military leadership regarding escalation dominance, technology integration and jointness in the post-Balakot era. It also documents, from an insider’s vantage point, how the state seeks to harness public outrage, media messaging and diplomatic signalling alongside kinetic operations to achieve strategic objectives.

However, the same stance also generates limitations. The book engages only lightly with the potential costs and risks of the operation, including collateral damage, frictions between agencies and the possibility of miscalculation under conditions of compressed decision-making. Gen. Dhillon largely writes as a participant-advocate rather than a detached analyst, and while this enhances authenticity, it can constrain critical scrutiny of operational and policy choices.

The Pakistani perspective, apart from official denials and predictable counter-narratives, receives minimal exploration beyond being a foil for Indian decision-making. For academic readers, this means the book must be read alongside independent analyses, Pakistani sources and international strategic assessments—such as think-tank studies that have documented the scale of the air operations and debated possible Indian aircraft losses—to build a more rounded picture.

Despite these caveats, the book is an important addition to the emergent corpus of Indian military and strategic writing that seeks to narrate and normatively justify cross-border kinetic responses to terrorism. It extends the trajectory begun with public discussions of the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot operation, but does so at a moment when India’s conventional capabilities, air-power projection and air-defence shield are more mature, and expectations of escalation control are correspondingly higher.

For scholars of international relations and security studies, the book is particularly useful as a primary account of decision-making logic and operational design in a limited, high-technology conflict between nuclear-armed states. It also offers a detailed illustration of how “whole-of-state” and narrative-warfare concepts are understood and practised by Indian strategic elites.

For practitioners in the military, intelligence and policy communities, Gen. Dhillon’s emphasis on integration—across services, between imported and indigenous systems, and between physical and informational domains—offers a concrete case study of the opportunities and challenges of modern joint operations.

In sum, “Operation Sindoor” should not be mistaken for a neutral, multi-archival history of the 2025 event; it is better understood as an authoritative participant narrative that seeks to shape both scholarly and public understandings of how India responds to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in the era of advanced air power and pervasive information warfare. Used with appropriate critical distance and supplemented by diverse sources, it can serve as a rich text for courses on South Asian security, crisis escalation and contemporary military operations.

The reviewer is an Indian Army veteran and senior Business Continuity professional & also an author and poet and is based out of New Delhi, India

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Published on March 15, 2026