Punjab Cannot Sleepwalk Into Another Dark Decade 

December 10, 2025

Sheena Sandhu

A retired civil servant

Punjab has seen this script before — targeted killings, masked gunmen, open threats issued in the name of religion, and a slow but deliberate attempt to rip open communal wounds. This is not just sporadic crime. It is a pattern. And the pattern is unmistakably dangerous.

On November 18, 2025, Shiv Sena (Bal Thackeray) leader Inderjit Karwal and his son Jimmy were shot at, in broad daylight in Phagwara. The incident immediately triggered street protests and shutdown calls from Hindu groups — exactly the kind of communal volatility the attackers seem to want. That the violence traces back to a 2018 clash that killed a Dalit youth reveals how old hostilities continue to be recycled as fuel for new conflict.

Three days earlier in Ferozepur, assailants murdered Naveen Arora, son of an RSS functionary. A little-known pro-Khalistan group — the “Sher-e-Punjab Brigade” — claimed responsibility and declared the killing part of a “dharam yudh” for Khalistan’s independence. The group issued a chilling list of future targets: RSS, Shiv Sena, police, and anyone they judge to be “agents of the Hindu government.”

These threats are not empty sloganeering. They indicate a coordinated effort to make political, religious, and social identity itself a death warrant.

A pattern that no one can ignore

Since 2016, at least 16 such targeted attacks or killings have taken place in Punjab — against VHP leaders, Dera Sacha Sauda followers, Shiv Sena organisers, church pastors, and senior RSS functionaries. Frequently executed in crowded localities, these assaults seek maximum fear impact with minimal operational exposure.

In each case, the target selection has been pointed: figures positioned at the frontlines of religious mobilisation or perceived ideological battles. The motive is clear — reignite a cycle of retaliatory outrage.

The new actors behind an old agenda

What is emerging is not simply a revival of the Khalistan militancy of the 1980s. It is something more diffuse, more opportunistic, and more insidious:

• Transnational handlers with Khalistani extremist allegiances, often operating from abroad
• Pakistan’s ISI pushing a proxy destabilisation campaign
• Local criminal syndicates serving as contract shooters and logistics operatives
• Digital radicalisers using propaganda to claim victories and recruit the disillusioned

Investigations show that many attackers have little ideological conviction. They are gangsters hired for a job — paid through drug proceeds, extortion networks, and hawala channels. Ideology becomes a cover, while criminality becomes the principal engine.

For foreign handlers, this hybrid model is a strategic boon. The chain of command becomes harder to trace. The violence appears more unpredictable. And law enforcement is forced to chase shadows.

The footprint of the “gangster-terror” nexus

Recent police operations across Punjab have exposed just how widespread this network has become.

On November 20, 2025, an ISI-backed multi-state module was dismantled. The operatives — notably non-Sikhs — had been recruited from outside Punjab and ordered to execute grenade attacks to spark communal tensions.

Days earlier in Gurdaspur, two Babbar Khalsa operatives were arrested with illegal weapons — arrests that prevented more targeted killings.

Seven such modules were dismantled in November alone, with multiple weapons seizures — a statistic that reassures yet simultaneously alarms. The scale of operations indicates not merely persistence, but escalation.

Why Punjab is uniquely vulnerable

Punjab’s current vulnerabilities are no secret:

• A long, porous international border
• Narcotics pipelines that have already weakened communities
• Economic anxieties and unemployment among youth
• Diaspora factions romanticising a long-dead insurgency

All these create fertile ground for recruitment and manipulation. Pakistan’s intelligence network has long understood this. So has the extremist fringe abroad.

Meanwhile, local politics remains consumed by power games — reducing internal security to a footnote rather than a priority.

What India must learn from history

Punjab’s darkest years were made possible not because the extremist narrative was strong, but because state capacity and political will were weak. That lesson cannot be forgotten.

The current trend is designed to stretch police resources thin, provoke communal flare-ups, and destabilise a society known for its plural resilience. If allowed to grow unchecked, the situation could shift swiftly — from sporadic violence to organised insurgency.

The path ahead: Resolve, not rhetoric

Punjab needs:

• Sharp, intelligence-first policing
• Crackdowns on foreign funding routes and cyber radicalisation
• Diplomatic pressure on safe havens of extremist handlers abroad
• Youth-focused deradicalisation and economic uplift
• Fast-tracked terror trials to deny shooters the glamour of impunity

Security must be elevated from a reaction to a strategy.

The warning is loud and clear

Punjab’s peace is not merely a state responsibility — it is a national imperative.

Every targeted killing is a test of the state’s resolve. Every delay in response is an invitation to the next attack.

India cannot afford to repeat history. The 1980s showed what happens when early warnings are ignored. The 2020s will show whether we learned.

Punjab is standing at the edge of a familiar cliff. The question is not whether we recognise the danger. The question is whether we will act before the fall.

(Views are personal.)