New Delhi: It is rare to find a book with a foreword that isn’t full of praise. What’s even rare is to see the critic share the stage with the author at the launch. But that’s exactly what happened on a Monday evening in Delhi’s India International Centre, at the unveiling of Hussain Zaidi’s RAW Hitman—The Real Story of Agent Lima. And the man who wrote the preface while also being part of the book discussion was none other than former Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar.
The evening saw a near full auditorium at the IIC, with the man himself in attendance on whose narration the Simon & Schuster book is based: Lakshman Singh Bisht, aka Lucky. An ex-National Security Guard Commando, Lucky’s life took a dramatic turn in 2011 when he was charged with the double murder of dreaded gangsters and arms dealers Rajendra Pargai and Amit Arya in the bordering areas of Nepal. Before his arrest and incarceration that lasted nearly four years and in 11 different prisons, Lucky had served as a security officer for VVIPs such as Narendra Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, Lal Krishna Advani, and Rajnath Singh, among others. He claims he was also part of many covert operations, including in the Northeast and Myanmar.
Zaidi’s book is based on detailed interviews that the former journalist conducted with the ‘self-professed assassin Lucky’. It peeps, according to Zaidi, “into the psyche of a man who is cold-blooded as a robot” and traces his journey after “the patriot was accused of murder, jailed, and gained the notoriety of a don”.
Books are often adapted into films. And Hussain Zaidi, a former investigative journalist, is no stranger to this. His works Black Friday, Mumbai Avengers and Dongri to Dubai – published in 2002, 2015 and 2012, respectively – have already seen the big screen.
But RAW Hitman has taken a somewhat different route. It came out of a 45-minute interview with Lucky that Zaidi conducted last year that has now accumulated over 1.5 million views on YouTube. The interview raises as many questions as it answers as the former NSG narrates his rise and fall. Zaidi admits that it’s only after the video went viral and he started getting calls from parties interested in buying rights for the story that he thought it was important to take what he had to a larger audience.
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A candid conversation
A cursory look at the comments on this video tells the kind of interest such stories generate among people, sometimes also underlining how intrigue and passion overrule the spirit of inquiry or cynicism that’s often required when believing/rejecting certain accounts. Perhaps this is why Zaidi himself put a caveat despite all his research and investigation before coming out with a story with all the ingredients of a pacy read. “My way of doing it is putting across all versions available. I am just raising questions, not delivering any judgement. And we have done all the cross-checking and fact-checking in this case,” Zaidi told this reporter at the event.
Kumar, who himself has written non-fiction such as Dial Don (2015), Khaki Files (2019) and A Cop in Cricket (2023), took Bisht’s story with a pinch of salt. The former top cop was all candid even as Bisht listened to him from the first row.
“What I feel is in dispute [in Bisht’s version] is whether that murder was carried out at the behest of R&AW [The Research and Analysis Wing]. This, I feel, ought to have been investigated a little further. It was not very difficult to do that. And if it was indeed the job of R&AW, why would that person who carried out the hit job come out in the open and say I did it for R&AW? Another point in question is, if indeed it was the job of R&AW, why did it not come to his rescue? Why would I come and beat my chest that I am an R&AW agent?” asked Kumar.
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Zaidi: ‘I take more of a drone shot’
The event that was moderated by Sayantan Ghosh, executive editor at Simon & Schuster India, also saw Kumar and Zaidi discuss the difference in the style of their narration and its importance, especially in the context of sensitive information involving national security and the general public.
“I am in a slightly better position than Mr Zaidi. As a person who has served in the government, I know what cannot be written. For example, I carried out an operation involving the Memons. There are so many small details which would be very interesting for an ordinary reader, but I knew that I should not mention these because this is not in the interest of national security. Those things are our trade secrets,” said Kumar who also thanked Zaidi for bringing the writer in him out and connecting him to the publishing world.
“In my foreword of this book, I have mentioned why should certain things be not made public which are carried out in a certain manner in public interest. So to that extent, “I know what to say and what not to say—instinctively and also by training. As opposed to a journalist, you are part of the action, unlike him [Zaidi], who comes to know after the incident is done,” added Kumar.
Zaidi, in his defence, said: “His [Kumar’s] camera is more of a close range. I take more of a drone shot. So I get to see a lot of things from a different perspective.”
For the keywords that Bisht’s story has—top trained commando, VVIP security officer, R&AW hitman—it’s bound to create intrigue.
And that there is appetite for Bisht’s story isn’t just evident in the comments section of his video interview with Zaidi. At the launch, 29-year-old Rajat Sharma, a member of the audience, had his own little story about an “R&AW agent-turned-teacher”. Sharma, who was previously associated with an ed-tech startup, said a teacher at his institute who taught internal security claimed to have worked for R&AW and that he had to join the current profession because a mission he was part of had failed. Sharma passionately complained before Zaidi, minutes after introducing himself to the author.
“I called him [the teacher] out”.
“I am fascinated by R&AW stories. I wanted to enter the Army. I couldn’t. But my passion towards such things is still alive. I got to know about this book launch via Instagram. So I came here.”
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)