This pastoral landscape is the strife-torn valley of Kashmir, and the son, Altaaf, is an orphan of war who has been adopted by a policeman, Inayat Khan (Sanjay Dutt), and his wife, Neelima (Sonali Kulkarni). Altaaf is slowly recovering from the psychic wounds of seeing his parents and his young sister shot to death before his eyes by a masked man.
Ten years later, a famed guerrilla fighter named Hilal Kohistani (Jackie Shroff) leads a determined band of men into the valley of Kashmir. These men are renegades who pride themselves on their distance from any other militant groups or government agencies. They are completely unknown and unsupported, and so are eager to make a worldwide reputation for themselves at one stroke.
The group is on a highly secret mission code, named 'Mission Kashmir', a closely guarded plan that will change the map of the subcontinent forever. For Hilal Kohistani, this all-important end justifies any means. He is absolutely willing to sacrifice millions of human lives, feelings, love, faith.
To successfully complete this mission, Hilal Kohistani needs a fearless soldier, a finely trained fighter whose deadly combat skills and burning anger will drive him unerringly to the target like a missile. Hilal Kohistani has just such a man: Altaaf (Hrithik Roshan).
And so Altaaf comes back to the streets and bylanes of his childhood. He fights for Hilal Kohistani, but he is also obsessed with his own private mission: he wants to, he must kill the masked intruder who haunts his nightmares -- Inayat Khan. In Srinagar, he meets his childhood sweetheart, Sufi (Preity Zinta), who is now a vivacious television reporter. In her beauty, compassion and optimism, Altaaf rediscovers love and hope.
And yet, Altaaf is consumed by his hatred for Khan. As the countdown for 'Mission Kashmir' ticks relentlessly closer towards an apocalypse, Altaaf and Khan engage in a duel to the death. The fate of Kashmir will depend on the outcome of their final, ferocious encounter.
The basic premise of the story � of a 10-year-old's hatred for his father to the extent of eliminating him � is the scoring point of Vinod Chopra Productions' MISSION KASHMIR, a film that takes a closer look at terrorism in strife-torn Kashmir. But the film goes haywire in the first half, for too much emphasis is given to the revenge aspect, than to the problems faced by Kashmiris.