Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. All characters, operations, and transactions are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual events, living persons, or intelligence operations is coincidental. Or perhaps instructive. The reader may decide.
Inside India’s shadow war in ‘Dhurandhar 4 – Fitna’
Prologue: The last briefing
A room on the third floor of Kartavya Path had no nameplate, no intercom, and no window that faced the street. K.R. Ramana had worked in South Block (and recently Kartavya Path) for 11 years. He would not work on it much longer.
He had chosen his successor himself. She was waiting in the corridor outside.
He opened the door. “Come in, Kavitha.”
Kavitha Reddy was 47 years old. She had grown up in Nizamabad, in a household where her father repaired government typewriters and her mother taught mathematics in a Zilla Parishad school. She had cleared the IFS examination in her first attempt, which most people took as evidence of exceptional ability. What it actually evidenced was something rarer: the capacity to sit with discomfort for very long periods without flinching.
She had spent 6 years in Riyadh, 3 in Geneva, and two embedded with a joint intelligence coordination cell that officially did not exist. Her Urdu was native. Her Arabic was operational. Her English had the particular precision of someone who had learned it not as a birthright but as a tool.
She sat down across from Ramana.
“How much time do we have?” she asked.
“For the handover? Two hours.”
“I meant for the operation.”
Ramana looked at her for a moment with something that was not quite a smile.
“Seventy-two hours. Perhaps less. The American envoy is strongly speculated to land in Islamabad on Monday morning, based on a framework put together mainly by Pakistan. If the framework is signed before we complicate it, we spend the next decade trying to dismantle something that has American legitimacy and Saudi money behind it.”
He paused.
“The western theatre is what the newspapers will eventually write about. But there is something else. Munir said publicly, and not by accident, that India would face challenges from the East. He was not being poetic. Lalmonirhat is 15 km from the Chicken’s Neck. Pakistani Air Force personnel are there. The DGFI chief has been to Islamabad. Bangladeshi civil servants are being trained in Lahore rather than in India. The eastern door, which we left open for 30 years because we had assumed friendship was permanent, is being systematically fitted with a Pakistani lock.”
He stood up.
“Two theatres. They may be different, but both are important to us in different ways. They involve four threads. Four officers besides yourself. You have 72 hours.”
He put one hand briefly on the desk as a gesture of transfer.
“One last thing. The doctrine.”
“We need not plant lies. Not because we are sentimental, but because a lie requires consistent maintenance. It needs to be fed, protected, updated, and eventually buried. Truth, correctly placed, maintains itself. Our only job is placement.”
He walked to the door. He did not look back.
The room was hers.
Act 1: What is being built
To understand what Kavitha’s team had 72 hours to complicate, you must first understand the architecture of what Field Marshal Asim Munir had spent 14 months constructing.
Pakistan’s army chief was attempting the most audacious repositioning in Pakistan’s history. A nation surviving on consecutive IMF tranches, Gulf charity, and the residual strategic value of its geography was presenting itself as the nuclear guarantor of the Islamic world.
Pakistan’s truce proposal for ending the US-Iran war was elegant, as all dangerous constructions are. Iran would formally surrender its independent nuclear ambitions. The Americans would declare a foreign policy victory ahead of their midterm election cycle.
Outside this US-Iran truce proposal, Pakistan, which already possesses approximately 175 nuclear warheads and a normalised arsenal that nobody in Washington wanted to unpack, would extend its deterrent umbrella over Tehran. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states would also gain nuclear deterrence without attribution. Turkey would be offered a seat at a table it did not own. And Pakistan – broke, politically fractured, fighting insurgencies on two fronts – would become structurally indispensable to the US, KSA, Turkey, and Iran simultaneously.
Pakistan’s plan for the eastern theatre was less visible and more dangerous precisely because of that invisibility. Munir had said publicly that India would face challenges from the East. It was not a boast. It was a progress report. Bangladesh, geographically embraced by India on three sides, historically the nation whose liberation India had midwifed in 1971, was to be systematically reoriented. Pakistani Air Force personnel were assessing Lalmonirhat, a disused airstrip fifteen kilometres from the Siliguri Corridor. The DGFI chief of Bangladesh had travelled quietly to Islamabad. Bangladeshi civil servants, hitherto trained at Indian institutions, were now travelling to Lahore. The Teesta water treaty was expiring. Bangladesh’s new government was being coached by its new friends, Pakistan, to use every available leverage point simultaneously.
The genius of the design, if one could use that word without admiration, was its simultaneity. A two-front squeeze that forced India to defend everywhere and concentrate nowhere.
Munir understood something his predecessors had not. A nation’s power is not only what it possesses. It is also what others believe it is about to possess. He was selling confidence as a commodity – nuclear guarantee, strategic reliability, Islamic leadership – that Pakistan did not yet fully own. The sale had to be completed before the buyers looked too carefully at the fine print.
Kavitha had read the full assessment the previous evening. She had slept for 4 hours. She was not particularly troubled by it.
She had four threads to run. Four officers, including herself. Each thread is a different city, a different fear, a different pressure point.
She opened the coordination file.
She began working.
Act 2: Four cities, four fears
Abu Dhabi
Kavitha ran this one herself, because it was the most consequential and because 6 years in Riyadh had given her an instinct for Gulf decision-making that no briefing document could replicate.
The logic was precise. The proposed Pakistan-Iran nuclear arrangement, whatever its stated architecture, had one practical effect that no amount of diplomatic framing could disguise: it consolidated Saudi Arabia as the Islamic world’s unchallenged security anchor, with Pakistan as its nuclear instrument. Every other Muslim-majority country would calibrate its security relationships accordingly.
For Abu Dhabi, this was not an abstract geopolitical concern. It was an existential one.
The UAE had spent decades constructing a specific identity: the pragmatic, internationally connected, religiously moderate Arab power that Washington, London, Delhi, and Tel Aviv all preferred dealing with. That identity depended on the UAE’s distinctiveness from Saudi Arabia, from Riyadh’s more assertive, more ideological, more regionally ambitious posture. A Saudi-Pakistani security architecture with American legitimacy did not merely threaten the UAE’s position. It made the UAE’s entire strategic differentiation redundant.
There was a second, sharper concern. The UAE had staked its regional foreign policy identity on the Abraham Accords. The normalisation architecture with Israel rested on a specific premise: that pragmatic Arab states and Israel shared more interests than they shared enemies, and that Iranian regional aggression was the common threat that made cooperation rational. A Pakistani nuclear umbrella over Iran did not neutralise Iran. It legitimised Iran’s security position while removing the pressure that had kept Iranian adventurism partially contained. A more secure Iran was, in Abu Dhabi’s interest, very dangerous.
And there was a third motivation that Kavitha judged the most operationally useful. UAE and Israel had, since the Abraham Accords, built a genuine intelligence relationship. They shared information on Iranian and Pakistani nuclear developments as a matter of institutional routine. If the UAE communicated its concerns about the framework to its Israeli counterparts, as it would naturally through existing channels, those concerns would reach Washington through the most powerful foreign policy transmission mechanism in American political history. As an Israeli security concern, which Washington’s Iran negotiators would be required to address.
India would be invisible in that chain. UAE’s concern was genuine and self-generated. Israel’s concern was genuine and self-generated. The chain needed only to be started invisibly.
Kavitha’s contact in Abu Dhabi was a senior Emirati official she had known since her Riyadh posting, a man whose formal title was in economic affairs and whose actual function was strategic assessment. They had met several times. The relationship had the specific texture of two professionals who respected each other’s intelligence and had never needed to pretend otherwise.
She did not fly to Abu Dhabi. She did not need to. A secure call of forty minutes was all that was needed.
She did not tell him what to do. She presented, methodically and without drama, the complete architecture of what was being. She presented it as information she thought he should have, because she thought he would find it relevant to his own assessments.
He was quiet for a moment after she finished.
“This is more complex than I thought,” he said.
“I think so too,” she said.
Another pause.
“We will look at this carefully.”
That was all. It was enough.
Within 36 hours, a concern originating in Abu Dhabi’s strategic assessment, about what a Pakistan nuclear umbrella over Iran would mean for the Abraham Accords architecture and for Iranian regional behaviour, had been communicated to Israel through existing bilateral channels. Within 48 hours, 3 members of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been quietly briefed, through the established relationship that needs no description here, that the framework as currently designed would face serious opposition from America’s closest regional allies on grounds of verification integrity and Iranian containment.
The Iran deal architects in Washington found themselves with a problem they had not anticipated. Not Indian objections. Allies’ objections. The difference, in Washington’s political grammar, was the difference between a footnote and a headline.
Ankara
Yusuf Karahan had no official title in any government records. He had spent 30 years moving between Ankara’s foreign policy establishment and its business community, in a way that made the boundary between the two largely invisible. He was the kind of man who lunched with ministers and was never photographed doing so.
His counterpart – Kavitha’s officer for the Ankara thread – was a second secretary at the Indian Embassy named Vikram Nair, who had been in Turkey for 3 years and had cultivated Karahan through the specific mechanism of being genuinely interested in Turkish history and saying so without flattery. Turks of Karahan’s generation responded to authentic curiosity about their civilization in a way they did not respond to diplomacy.
The message Vikram carried was not a document. It was an observation, offered during a long lunch at a restaurant that had poor acoustics, as a puzzle he had been thinking about and could not resolve.
The puzzle was this: the proposed Islamic security architecture gave Turkey a seat at the table. But who owned the table? Pakistan controlled the nuclear asset. Saudi Arabia controlled the financing. The Americans controlled the legitimacy. What, specifically, did Turkey control in this arrangement? What decision could Ankara make that would affect the architecture’s operation?
He presented this not as a criticism but as a structural question, the kind an analyst asks when mapping an arrangement.
Karahan said nothing for a while.
“You are describing an arrangement in which Turkey is decorative,” he said finally.
“I am describing an arrangement whose structure I do not fully understand,” Vikram said carefully. “Perhaps Turkey’s role is more substantive than the architecture suggests on paper.”
The careful qualification was the most effective part. It invited Karahan to close the gap himself. To investigate. To ask his own government’s foreign policy apparatus what, precisely, Turkey’s operational role in this arrangement would be.
The question, once asked inside Ankara’s foreign policy establishment, generated a meeting. The meeting generated a memorandum. The memorandum generated a delay while the answers were sought.
Erdogan’s inner circle did not oppose the arrangement. In fact, he knew that his concurrence for the proposal was merely nominal, and that made matters worse. In any case, Turkey introduced a condition: Turkey’s role required a formal definition before Turkish formal endorsement could be extended. The condition was reasonable, procedural, and entirely defensible. It was also, in the context of a framework that needed to be signed within days, the functional equivalent of a tiny spanner thrown into a clock.
Tehran
Of the five threads, this was simultaneously the most delicate and the most structurally sound, because it required no exaggeration and no framing. The facts, presented without commentary to the right person, were sufficient.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan had carried out documented massacres of Shia communities on Pakistani soil. It operated from Afghan territory with the passive tolerance of the Taliban regime that Pakistan’s military had cultivated for two decades. It was openly, programmatically, theologically anti-Shia. And Asim Munir’s army, the institution now proposing to extend a nuclear guarantee over the world’s pre-eminent Shia state, had spent those same 2 decades creating the political and logistical conditions for TTP’s existence while being unable, or unwilling, to dismantle it. And, could Iran and Saudi Arabia, not the best of friends, be under the same Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella? All these were not new questions; Iranian theologians and the military establishment were already asking themselves these questions internally; this only articulated the questions more sharply.
The question that any Iranian cleric would ask, upon seeing this documentation, was not strategic. It was theological. Can the guardian of Shia Islam accept protection from a Sunni Deobandi military that could not (or consciously did not) prevent the massacre of Shia Muslims within its own borders? Is such an arrangement a security guarantee, or is it subordination dressed as a security guarantee?
The channel was a Pakistani Shia scholar, Dr. Murtaza Naqvi, who had left Lahore 20 years ago and built a modest but respected position in Qom’s scholarly community. He had no political affiliations and considerable theological credibility precisely because of his distance from both Pakistani and Iranian state structures. His connection to India was a legitimate academic endowment — a Hyderabad-based trust that had funded three of his published papers on interfaith dialogue.
The endowment’s Indian trustee, a retired professor of Islamic studies, genuine in his scholarship, uninstructed in anything beyond a request to share some documented material, sent Naqvi a careful compilation of TTP’s anti-Shia operations over the previous 4 years. Every incident sourced. Every date is verifiable. Every victim named where names were available. No commentary. No conclusion. A covering note that said only: I thought this material deserved scholarly attention.
Naqvi read it over two evenings.
He did not write a paper. He raised, in a gathering of scholars at a Qom seminary, what he described as a question of jurisprudential urgency: under what conditions could a Muslim community accept security guarantees from an external party, and what obligations did the guarantor carry with respect to Muslim lives already under its protection?
The question was not answered that evening.
It was not meant to be. It was meant to travel. And in the specific ecosystem of Qom’s scholarly community, where questions of that quality move through networks of trust and reputation rather than through any formal channel, it did exactly that.
Within 48 hours, the question had reached ears that were simultaneously theological and political. Iran’s decision-making was not housed in its foreign ministry. It was housed in the infrastructure of clerical authority that surrounded and preceded the state. A security arrangement that those voices found theologically compromised could not survive in Tehran regardless of what its foreign ministry signed.
Nothing had been fabricated. Nothing had been planted. A Pakistani scholar in Qom had asked a question that the facts of his own country’s recent history made unavoidable.
Dhaka
This thread required no intelligence operation, no careful channel management, and no deniability architecture. It required only that the right information reach the people who had the most straightforward reason to act on it.
That information had one additional dimension worth placing on the table: Pakistan’s record as a strategic patron. The Taliban were Pakistan’s own creation. Pakistan could not control them, could not secure its own western border against them, and was now watching them provide sanctuary to TTP from Afghan soil. A country that could not manage the consequences of its own strategic investments in its immediate neighbourhood was presenting itself as Bangladesh’s security partner.
The BGMEA leadership and the government officials who would eventually represent them deserved to see that context alongside the trade stability concern. The Bangladesh garment industry was not a political actor. It was an economic one. Its $17 Bn annual export revenue depended on a supply chain whose most critical nodes were Indian: yarn, fabric inputs, land transit routes to ports, electricity grid connectivity, and refined petroleum.
The BGMEA (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association) was arguably the most consequential non-state institution in Bangladesh, with more practical leverage over government policy than any parliamentary opposition.
The BGMEA leadership understood one thing with the clarity that proximity to the supply chain provides: stable India-Bangladesh relations were not a foreign policy preference. They were a business necessity. Any development that created security friction between Dhaka and Delhi – the kind of friction that might lead Delhi to reconsider transit arrangements, connectivity agreements, or trade preferences – was an existential threat to their members’ livelihoods.
They did not need to be told this. They knew it.
What they needed was to understand that the deepening of Pakistan-Bangladesh defence ties – Pakistani Air Force personnel at Lalmonirhat, DGFI visits to Islamabad, Pakistani training delegations mapping infrastructure fifteen kilometres from a critical Indian chokepoint – was being watched in New Delhi with a quality of attention that had implications for the trade relationship.
This information was shared through the most natural channel available: a CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) delegation that visited Dhaka for a scheduled bilateral business forum. In the margins of the forum, in the way that businesspeople share concerns that governments cannot officially raise, Indian counterparts mentioned that the current security optics were generating questions in Delhi about the long-term stability of the trade framework.
No threat was made. None was needed. The BGMEA leadership was not naive. They understood immediately what ‘questions about the long-term stability of the trade framework’ meant in practice.
Within a week, the BGMEA submitted a representation to the Bangladesh Foreign Ministry – through entirely normal institutional channels, as it does regularly on matters affecting trade – requesting clarity on how the government’s evolving defence relationships were being managed with reference to Bangladesh’s core economic partnerships.
The representation was polite. It was specific. It was the kind of communication that governments cannot ignore when it comes from an institution representing the country’s largest export sector.
It introduced, into Dhaka’s calculations, a domestic economic voice that no amount of Pakistani strategic coaching had anticipated.
Act 3: The weight of accumulated doubt
The American envoy landed in Islamabad on Monday morning as scheduled.
He held 3 meetings on Monday. He sent a cable to Washington on Monday evening. The cable used the phrase “more groundwork required among them” – the diplomatic formulation that means, precisely, the room is not as ready as we were told.
The framework was not signed on Monday.
What the envoy had encountered was not a single objection from a single party. It was the specific atmospheric quality of a room in which 2 consequential parties (and one less consequential) had, independently, developed reservations that none of them would quite articulate as opposition, but all of them were expressed as conditions.
Iran’s foreign ministry was receiving, through its own internal channels, signals from Qom that the theological dimensions of the arrangement required further examination. The signals were not instructions. They were the kind of ambient clerical concern that no Iranian foreign minister could afford to dismiss. It was ready for the possible American threats.
Israel and Turkey had reservations as well.
In Washington, 3 senators on the Foreign Relations Committee were asking questions about verification integrity and what a Pakistani nuclear umbrella over Iran would mean for the containment logic that underpinned any Iran deal.
The envoy was a professional. He recognised what he was looking at. Not a coordinated campaign. Or at least nothing that could be suspected to be one. Simply, the particular phenomenon of an idea whose moment had been disrupted. A framework that had looked like a formality 3 days back now required additional work.
He extended his Islamabad stay by 48 hours.
He requested supplementary consultations.
The framework was postponed.
But he was not hopeful.
Kavitha received the confirmation at 7 am while having her pesarattu at her desk. She read the cable twice.
Her deputy appeared in the doorway with the specific expression of a man who has been rehearsing a question.
“There are questions in certain circles about the timing of the regional complications.”
She looked at him.
“An Emirati official applied his own strategic assessment based on information available to any careful analyst. A Turkish foreign policy professional asked his own government a structural question about Turkey’s role in an arrangement Turkey was being asked to endorse. A Pakistani scholar in Qom raised a jurisprudential question about the conditions for legitimate protection under Islamic law. The BGMEA submitted a routine representation to the Bangladeshi Foreign Ministry about trade stability.”
She picked up her spoon.
“Which of those would you like to characterise as an Indian intelligence operation?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“The doctrine,” she said, “is not about what we do. It is about what we enable others to do, with their own eyes, in their own interest, using facts that were always there.”
She looked out of the window at the Kartavya Path courtyard.
“Munir’s architecture did not fail because India attacked it. It developed friction because it was built on a foundation that required everyone involved not to look too carefully at what was underneath. We simply…”
She paused in the way that Ramana had once paused, in a room one floor above this one, before the sentence that ended every lesson.
“…gave them better light.”
Her deputy left. She sat alone in the room that was now hers, eating pesarattu that was almost right, thinking about Lalmonirhat, about the Chicken’s Neck, about the BGMEA representation that was working its way through Dhaka’s bureaucracy, about the question still travelling through Qom’s seminary networks, and about the Emirati official.
A postponement was not a victory. She had no illusions about that. Munir would continue to manoeuvre. The eastern pressure on the Chicken’s Neck would not disappear because a garment industry association had asked a polite question.
But time, in geopolitics, was not neutral. It accumulated. It allowed reality to do what propaganda could not: compound quietly, without announcement, until the original calculation no longer held. None of the objections from Abu Dhabi, Ankara, Dhaka, and Tehran would go away; they still needed to be addressed.
She had bought India time that it did not have 3 days back.
That was her job.
Postscript: A note for the policymaker
Seven specific observations from the above References, and the many PGurus video podcasts of the 3 Good Generals.[1][2]
First. The vulnerabilities exploited in this story are real. The GHQ was stormed on May 9, 2023. The TTP has carried out documented anti-Shia operations on Pakistani soil. Pakistan cannot control the Taliban it created, cannot secure its own western border against TTP, and is simultaneously presenting itself as a reliable security partner to Bangladesh. Lalmonirhat is 15 km from the Siliguri Corridor. Pakistani Air Force personnel have held discussions in Dhaka about simulators and training. Bangladesh’s DGFI chief has travelled to Islamabad. None of this required fabrication. It required only placement.
Second. The chain from India to Abu Dhabi to Israel to Washington is not theoretical. It is the operational logic of how allied concerns travel in the current geopolitical environment. India’s deep bilateral relationship with UAE, built on the CEPA, on diaspora depth, on the Modi-MBZ personal relationship, is already the foundation for exactly the kind of strategic conversation Kavitha has in this story. The question is whether that foundation is being used for its full potential, or merely for its transactional surface.
Third. The Shia-Sunni fault line is the structural crack in any Pakistan-anchored Islamic security architecture. A Deobandi Sunni military cannot credibly guarantee Shia Iran without Iranian clerical authority finding the arrangement theologically problematic. India’s connections to Shia scholarly networks – through Lucknow, through AMU, through the Shia Waqf Board, through legitimate academic endowments with Qom-connected scholars – are an underutilised instrument of exactly the kind of precise influence this story describes.
Fourth. The Bangladesh thread is an important long-term lesson. India allowed three decades of genuine goodwill with Dhaka to remain soft — warm in texture but unbinding in structure. The BGMEA channel works in the short term because economic interdependence is real. But economic interdependence without structural safeguards – long-term infrastructure agreements, permanent connectivity arrangements, binding frameworks that survive political transitions in Dhaka – is a foundation that can be eroded. The window to build those structural safeguards is not permanently open.
Fifth. Every channel in this story used people acting in their own rational interest, carrying verified information, arriving independently at conclusions that served their own strategic calculations. India provided no false intelligence, ran no disinformation operation, and planted no fabricated narrative. The doctrine is not complicated. It is the systematic identification of whose rational self-interest aligns with India’s security interests, and the precise delivery of accurate information to that person at the moment when their self-interest is most sharply engaged. What this requires is not a larger intelligence budget. It is not a more aggressive foreign policy. It is something more specific and more demanding: a small number of officers with genuine, trust-based relationships in the right cities, the analytical clarity to identify the precise pressure point in each theatre, and the doctrinal discipline to use truth rather than fabrication as the instrument.
Sixth. This story illustrates that such operations may be possible, often as short term measures. In this story, Kavitha takes two parallel steps in different cities for each of the two theatres, to make sure her ultimate goal succeeds even if one or more of these city-specific operations fail.
Seventh, and the most important. Dhurandhar kind of operation can’t be a substitute for political and defence actions of diplomatic and operational kind. It can only be an add-on, and sometimes handy when time is not on your side.
India has always understood Chanakya in the classroom. The question this story asks is whether we understand him in the room where the decision is being made, and whether we are in that room before the ink dries.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
References:
[1] Pakistan’s agenda as the Mediator between Iran & US – a new twist! • Rajiv Malhotra – May 19, 2026, PGurus
[1] Pakistan and Bangladesh – Partners Again? A New Axis Emerging? • #GoodMorningIndia – May 20, 2026, PGurus
For all the latest updates, download PGurus App.
- Dhurandhar 4: Fitna, a short fictional thriller - May 23, 2026
- Why India doesn’t attract domestic & foreign investment - May 20, 2026
- Engineering Finishing School: Executive summary - May 19, 2026
