Punjab is not merely facing a law-and-order problem—it is confronting a carefully calibrated campaign of hybrid warfare, and the fingerprints of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are increasingly difficult to ignore.

The pattern is now unmistakable. On March 30, 2026, a low-intensity blast struck a police facility in Bhindi Saidan, Amritsar—just the latest in a chain of roughly two dozen grenade attacks on security establishments since late 2024. Weeks earlier, on February 22, two policemen were gunned down at a police outpost in Gurdaspur, a sensitive border district. These are not random acts of violence. They are deliberate, repeated strikes on law enforcement—the very institutions that anchor state authority.

What transforms these incidents from isolated attacks into a strategic concern is what investigators have uncovered since. Arrests made on April 13 exposed an ISI-backed module operating under handlers based across the border. The model is as chilling as it is effective: recruit local youth—often petty criminals or individuals struggling with drug addiction—offer them relatively small sums (sometimes as little as ₹4 lakh), and deploy them for targeted strikes. Minimal cost, minimal exposure, maximum disruption.

This is proxy warfare stripped to its most efficient form.

The involvement of Khalistani-linked networks adds another layer. A separate operation by Delhi Police on April 10 led to the arrest of operatives tied to Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), who had been conducting reconnaissance of military installations across Punjab and even in Delhi. Their activities—installing surveillance systems and relaying intelligence back to ISI handlers—point to a deeper, more structured ecosystem of coordination.

Names emerging from investigations—such as ISI-linked Shahzad Bhatti working alongside domestic gangsters like Jeshan Akhtar and Amandeep Singh alias Pannu—highlight the convergence of three worlds: cross-border intelligence, extremist networks, and organized crime. This nexus is the core of the current threat.

To understand the significance of this shift, it helps to recall earlier attacks like the 2015 Gurdaspur attack and the 2016 Pathankot attack—large-scale, high-visibility operations carried out by Pakistan-based militant groups. Those attacks triggered immediate national and international responses. Today’s strategy is different. It is quieter, deniable, and designed to stay below the threshold of full-scale escalation.

Instead of spectacular strikes, the focus is on attrition: targeting police stations, outposts, and personnel. The objective is not territorial control but psychological erosion—undermining morale within the police force and creating a persistent sense of insecurity among the public.

The ISI’s role in this evolving playbook is central. Rather than deploying identifiable militant cadres, it is leveraging local vulnerabilities. Punjab’s border belt—long exposed to smuggling routes—has become fertile ground for this strategy. Narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, and now targeted violence are no longer separate challenges; they are interconnected components of a single operational design.

At the heart of this design is the youth-gang nexus. Economic distress, unemployment, and widespread drug abuse have created a pool of vulnerable recruits. For many, the leap from small-time criminality to acting as a proxy for cross-border handlers is alarmingly small. The reported use of teenagers for reconnaissance activities underscores just how deeply these networks are embedding themselves.

Smuggling corridors—particularly through riverine and agricultural routes—serve as logistical arteries. They move drugs and weapons, but also intelligence, money, and instructions. What emerges is a decentralized, adaptive network that is far harder to dismantle than traditional militant organizations.

This is why the ISI angle cannot be treated as a peripheral detail—it is the organizing principle of the current threat landscape. The agency’s strategy appears to be one of sustained destabilization without overt escalation: keep the region unsettled, stretch security resources, and exploit internal socio-economic fractures.

Punjab today faces a threefold challenge: the attempted revival of both Islamist and Khalistani militant frameworks, the entrenchment of narcotics and arms trafficking networks, and the increasing use of local criminal gangs as instruments of proxy violence. Of these, the last two are arguably the most dangerous because they are diffuse, deeply embedded, and self-sustaining.

To its credit, the Punjab Police claims to have solved all 24 grenade attack cases, dismantling modules and arresting operatives. But tactical successes, while important, are not enough. As long as the financial and logistical pipelines—particularly those linked to the drug trade—remain intact, new modules can be regenerated with relative ease.

What Punjab is confronting is not a series of disconnected incidents but a theatre of hybrid war. Drones, narcotics, small arms, digital communication, and local recruits are all part of the same matrix—one that is being shaped, guided, and sustained by the ISI.

The response, therefore, cannot be purely kinetic. It must be structural. Financial investigations need to choke the flow of drug money that fuels recruitment. Border management must adapt to non-traditional infiltration methods. And perhaps most critically, the socio-economic conditions that make local youth susceptible to recruitment must be addressed with urgency.

Because in this kind of war, the battlefield is not just the border—it is society itself.