The Lover Boy of Bahawalpur

Inside the world of the Jaish-e-Mohammed – from the Parliament attack to the Pulwama bombing

In February 2019 one of the worst terror attacks on India takes place in Pulwama in Kashmir. Forty Indian soldiers are dead. But when the NIA probes the bombing they hit one dead end after another. Who were the actual masterminds of this audacious strike? It seemed impossible to find out.

In this thrilling and deeply reported book, the award-winning author and journalist Rahul Pandita tells the story of how a team of extraordinary NIA sleuths cracks the case one jigsaw piece at a time. Against all odds, they manage to connect the dots between a seemingly routine troublemaker put in preventive detention at the time of the abrogation of Article 370, a mobile phone full of lustful messages recovered after an encounter that killed a terrorist and the Pulwama attack itself. The sinister roots of the strike, they would discover, are several decades deep and can be traced to one man – Masood Azhar – and the empire of terror he created in Kashmir.

In this book we enter the terrifying world of radical Islamists and secret militant operations, of intelligence agencies and elite counter-terrorism units. With never-before-published details about the Pulwama case, the resultant Balakot strike and the arcane world of terror groups, this is one of the most significant works on Kashmir and terrorism in recent times.