The Mutation of Terror: From Pulwama to Faridabad

 THE TWO VIDEOS, at first invoked in the same breath, could not be more different once you watch them close­ly. Adil Ahmad Dar, the Pulwama suicide bomber of 2019, appeared before the camera with the raw theatre of a foot soldier: a young man who could not even re­member his few lines properly, and hence someone had to dub over his. That monologue was performative, meant to thunder across the Kashmir Valley and into Pakistan-backed propaganda channels. The video of the Red Fort bomber, Umar Nabi, recorded in a cramped room in Faridabad, feels like it belongs to an entirely different uni­verse. There is no flag in the backdrop, no weapons staged for effect, no swagger. He sits like a philosophy student in a seminar, com­posed, soft-spoken, as if he is clearing doubts about metaphysics rather than “martyrdom”; he speaks English like some Kashmiris who go abroad and then pronounce Kashmir as Cashmir.

If Dar’s video was meant to rattle India, Nabi’s feels like a message crafted for those who might see themselves in him. It is an attempt, in other words, to normalise his radicalisation and make it seem achievable, even rational. Together, the contrast between the two clips tells a larger story, which is of continuity, but a mutated one. This mutation appears at a jarring confluence of two disturbing developments: the accidental dismantling of the ‘white-collar’ network involving doctors, and the blowing up of a moving bomb in a crowded area in the national capital. It is a clear warning of how domestic terror modules may be diversi­fying, professionalising and operating with stealth from inside India’s institutions.

The question is no longer whether India may face further at­tacks; it is how many, how soon, and how well-prepared it is.

“The way he [Nabi] spoke in that video is chilling,” says Yashovardhan Jha Azad, former special director, Intelligence Bureau. “It means that the indoctrination of people like him is very successful. Because more than an invitation to kill, this in­doctrination is saying that we are inviting you for an elevated puritanical, Islamic existence.”

The chain of events began earlier this month when, in a co­ordinated operation across Kashmir, Haryana (Faridabad) and Uttar Pradesh, authorities arrested several individuals, among them medical doctors, suspected of involvement in a terror net­work with alleged links to the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Kashmir-based Ansar Ghazwat ul Hind (AGH). This includes a lady doctor from Lucknow, Shaheen Shahid. Investiga­tors believe that she may have been in touch with Afirah Bibi, the widow of the Pulwama attack mastermind, Umar Farooq, who also happened to be Jaish chief Masood Azhar’s nephew. One raid in Faridabad turned up about 2,900kg of explosive-making mate­rial, including 360kg of suspected ammonium nitrate. It marked a shift in pattern. Rather than the large-scale militant incursions or the infiltrations of previous decades, what is emerging is a more subtle ‘insider’ model: radicalised individuals embedded in civilian professions, able to move relatively freely, maintain cover, and perhaps execute strikes when opportunities arise.

“No matter how many modules security agencies bust, there is always a chance of a slip here and there. The system, no mat­ter how hard one tries, is not foolproof,” says Ashok Chand, the former Delhi Police officer who investigated the 2001 Parliament attack. “Earlier, for exposure, one would have to go to a terrorist camp. Now there is no need; much of it is possible online.”

Officials who have spent years tracking insurgency in Kash­mir and monitoring jihadist cells across Indian cities admit that the backgrounds of those arrested in Faridabad and Srinagar have surprised them.

One senior investigator described it as discovering “a new spe­cies in an old forest.” The spectre of the ‘white-coat radical’ has therefore rattled New Delhi less for the novelty of it than for what it implies, which is that the frontier between normal life and violent ideologies is thinner than the country had assumed. The Red Fort blast, coming so soon after the arrests, appears to con­firm that some version of this darker reality is already in motion.

For India’s security es­tablishment, the unease lies not merely in the fact of an attack but in the method. It conveyed a message that even heavily surveilled spaces are permeable, par­ticularly when the perpe­trator is not an infiltrator from across the Line of Control but a 30-something professional who drives a common sedan. The Indian intelligence community had long assumed that the greatest threat lay in Kash­mir, or emanated from Pakistan-based groups that historically viewed Delhi and Mumbai as trophies. Terror modules outside Kashmir are not new. But the arrests of doctors in different states have drawn attention to a form of radicalisation less dramatic but more insidious: individuals who grow up in one part of India, study in another, and use the freedoms of modern mobility to operate below the radar of agencies who may still be thinking in terms of region-specific patterns. One investigator involved in the Faridabad case remarked that the men and women they arrested “looked like anyone you would meet on an ordinary day in a hos­pital corridor.” It is this ordinariness, he said, that worried him.

India has faced internal terror cells before. But those networks were often composed of small-town youth, or individuals already under one or another watchlist. What alarms security officials now is the level of educational attainment and professional inte­gration. A doctor commuting between clinics or laboratories does not draw attention; a medical intern travelling back to Kashmir for a family visit is unremarkable. In such a large country, the camouflage of normalcy is its own advantage.

“This looks like part of a bigger process,” says Manoj Kumar Lall, who has dealt with critical internal security challenges, in­cluding during his almost two-decade stint in the Intelligence Bureau. “The Kashmiri terrorists have now started making their base outside Kashmir and have started acting independently. It is like they want their act to be demonstrative in a way that it will teach the Indian government a lesson.”

Urbanisation has inadvertently helped these networks. The Indian city—loud, anonymising, and porous—is an ideal habitat for individuals who want to move fast without attracting undue curiosity. Large institutions such as universities and hospitals also generate their own steady churn, with new faces appearing every month; and the Kash­miri doctors wisely chose Faridabad as their base. It is away from the heart of Delhi but close enough to be able to reach in a matter of an hour or so. In such a setting, a radi­calised young professional can survive for years without raising suspicion. The revela­tion that caches of explosives were stored in staff quarters and compact city flats has forced agencies to re-examine the boundaries of what they believed possible.

The Faridabad episode has also exposed in many ways the failure in basic policing. That the doctors could pro­cure cars and gather explo­sives and other material over a period of several months without evoking suspicion is worrisome. “There were meetings going on, cars were being sold, explosive material was being gathered and nobody had a clue. That this could go unchecked for two-and-a-half-years points at silent complicity of people around the accused or that they just could not be interested,” says Azad. He recalls the time when he was in active policing, serving in various positions in Madhya Pradesh. “I used to know every pujari, every maulvi, every member of socio-religious organisations and interacted with them frequently. But in this case, some policeman should have known what is happening,” he says.

A former intelligence officer who does not want to be named points at how ignoring common acts of crime leads to bigger acts like terrorism. “False identification, false documents, illegal money transactions, mobile connection on false ID, unchecked car transfers — had these things remained in check, we wouldn’t have a terrorist attack,” he says. “The prevailing sentiment among many in the police is that these things are beneath their dignity. Small crimes do not move us any longer.”

The timing of these events also adds layers of political and dip­lomatic complexity. India, already managing tense relations with Pakistan, must now decide how to calibrate its response when the alleged actors are not infiltrators but Indian citizens with profes­sional identities. This hybrid threat requires a posture very differ­ent from Operation Sindoor: more policing than retaliation, more intelligence work than troop deployment.

Officials acknowledge that several conditions favour the emer­gence of more such modules. India’s law-enforcement architecture remains heavily state-centric; coordination across jurisdictions is still uneven. The Faridabad cell, for instance, straddled three states before its exposure. And while Central agencies have grown more technically sophisticated, the sheer scale of India’s digital commu­nication—encrypted apps, decentralised financial flows, social media subcultures—creates oceans in which even well-trained ana­lysts struggle to fish. At the same time, the availability of explosives and chemicals across India’s industrial belts remains a recurring challenge, despite attempts at tightening regulation.

Security experts warn that the coming months will be crucial. The discovery of huge quantities of explosives suggests that at least some elements within this network had plans that went beyond a single attack. Whether these plans can be executed now that the network has been partly exposed depends on two factors: how many individuals remain undetected, and how successfully the state can map the command structure behind them.

The Indian government has moved quickly to reassure the public that the situation is under control. Yet, privately, officials concede that the ‘insider’ nature of the recent cases complicates the calculus. Police can seal borders, fortify cities and disrupt infiltration routes, but there is no equivalent measure that can be applied to the country’s hospitals, colleges or transport hubs without alienating millions of ordinary people. As one former intelligence official put it, “The challenge is not only to catch the guilty, but to do so without making the innocent feel watched.”

Communities, too, are watching. The arrests of young Kashmiri doctors have inevitably revived older anxieties about profiling and prejudice. Many in Kashmir fear that these cases could feed an already-growing narrative that paints a whole region’s youth with suspicion. Security officials insist that the arrests were based on hard evidence, not conjecture; yet, they also understand that in a conflict-scarred region, perception can be as consequential as fact. How delicately the state manages this tension may deter­mine whether future radicalisation is curbed or fuelled.

But it is not only about Kashmir now. Azad says it is time for the prime minister to call chief ministers of vulnerable states and tell them that they need to engage with members of society on a big scale. “Engagement with the Muslim community, particu­larly, must take place,” he says. Azad points at the dangers of what two doctors, arrested separately as part of a bio-terror module, aimed to achieve. The two doctors, arrested from Gujarat, accord­ing to the police, had plans of mixing poisonous ricin in temple prasad to kill people. “Now, imagine what kind of societal tension it would have led to,” says Azad.

Lall believes that as part of strategy to prevent such attacks, the police must identify what he calls “terrorist-precursor crimes”, which means identifying problem areas which terrorists might exploit in gaining a foothold in a community and establishing their infrastructure. “We must create hostile environment for terrorists, which includes targeting tenant verification, credit card fraud, welfare fraud like procuring a ration card or gaining government employment,” he says.

For the moment, the country is left with the sobering image of severed limbs near the ramparts of a monument where the prime minister unfurls the Tricolour each August. It is a reminder that India’s vulnerabilities are no longer confined to distant moun­tains or policing blind spots. They may be nestled in the very places where its citizens heal, study, commute and work. And as investigators sift through evidence from apartments in Faridabad to houses in Kashmir, the uneasy question lingers over Delhi: is this an isolated rupture, or the start of something more ominous stirring from within?