Tikoo

January 1990. Midnight.
Kashmir froze as loudspeakers roared across the Valley.
Convert. Leave. Or die.

Fear spread like wildfire. By sunrise, Pandit families packed whatever they could carry. By the end of winter, over 350,000 people had abandoned a land that had cradled their identity for thousands of years.
It felt sudden. It felt chaotic. It felt unavoidable.

Many believed the violence erupted without warning.
Shadows Over the Valley reveals a far more unsettling truth.

The operation that triggered the exodus began a decade earlier, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
In 1979, the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the largest covert operation in its history. Pakistan’s military leadership built vast networks of camps and radical training centres that reshaped the region. General Zia-ul-Haq engineered an ideological project that rippled across borders and generations.

The Afghan war ended. The fighters remained. The weapons remained. The infrastructure remained.
Pakistan redirected the entire apparatus towards Kashmir under a strategy known as Operation Tupac.
Shadows Over the Valley follows the movement of men, money, and ideology across borders. It exposes the decade-long construction of Operation Tupac. It decodes the silent signals that preceded the Pandit exodus. Authorities ignored warnings. Officials dismissed patterns. Decision-makers sealed the fate of an ancient community.
This is not simply a story of one tragic night in January.

This is the story of how global Cold War strategy entered a quiet valley and systematically dismantled its oldest community. The book reveals the calculated architecture behind what appeared to be chaos. The ISI planned it. The CIA enabled it. Zia weaponised ideology. Together, they built the strategic foundations of a conflict that continues to shape South Asia today.