[By Devansh Desai Mumbai Samachar Desk]
New Delhi: For decades, India’s response to terrorism has largely been shaped by the crisis of the moment reactive, fragmented, and often caught off guard by the speed and sophistication of evolving threats. That approach officially changed on Monday, when the Ministry of Home Affairs quietly uploaded a document to its website that counter-terrorism experts may one day look back on as a turning point. The document is called PRAHAAR. And it is unlike anything India has released before.
Translated loosely as “strike” in Hindi, PRAHAAR is India’s first-ever comprehensive National Counter-Terrorism Policy and Strategy a structured, forward-looking blueprint that signals a fundamental change in how the country intends to identify, confront, and ultimately dismantle the forces that threaten its internal security.
From Reaction to Prevention
The most significant departure in PRAHAAR is philosophical. Where previous frameworks tended to mobilise after an attack had already taken place, this policy commits India to a proactive “whole-of-government” approach one that draws every arm of the state into a coordinated, pre-emptive effort rather than leaving counter-terrorism to security agencies alone.
The MHA’s document is candid about the scale and diversity of threats India currently faces. The country, it notes, is exposed to terrorist activity across all three domains land, water, and air. Critical pillars of the national economy, from power grids and railways to aviation, ports, defence installations, space infrastructure, and atomic energy facilities, are squarely in the crosshairs of both state and non-state actors. The policy acknowledges that capacities have been developed to protect each of these sectors, though the nature of those capacities is not elaborated upon publicly.
Naming the Threat Without Labelling a Faith
One of the more carefully worded sections of the document addresses the identity of terrorism itself. “India does not link terrorism to any specific religion, ethnicity, nationality or civilisation,” it states a line that reflects both a legal and diplomatic position the government has consistently maintained on international forums.
Yet the document is equally direct about where a significant share of the threat originates. India, it says, has long suffered from “sponsored terrorism” emanating from across the border, with “Jihadi terror outfits as well as their frontal organisations” actively planning and executing attacks against Indian targets. Global groups Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are identified by name, with the document noting their attempts to stoke violence inside India through the use of sleeper cells embedded within the country.
Drones, Dark Web, and Digital Warfare
If traditional terrorism was defined by explosives and gunmen, the threats catalogued in PRAHAAR paint a picture of a far more technologically fluid adversary.
Handlers operating from across the border, the policy notes, are now routinely using drones to facilitate terror-related activities and attacks, with Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir cited as primary theatres of this aerial threat. Simultaneously, terrorist organisations are increasingly intertwining with organised criminal networks tapping into their logistical infrastructure and recruitment pipelines to plan and execute strikes inside India.
The digital dimension receives pointed attention. Social media platforms, instant messaging applications, encryption tools, and the dark web are being exploited for propaganda, fundraising, and real-time operational coordination enabling a degree of anonymity that poses serious challenges for investigators and intelligence agencies.
Perhaps most alarmingly, the document flags the growing difficulty of intercepting terrorist access to CBRNED material a term that encompasses Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosive, and Digital threats. The potential weaponisation of drones and robotics by hostile actors, both state-backed and independent, is flagged as another domain demanding urgent attention.
Building Cases That Hold
Beyond detection and disruption, PRAHAAR also turns its focus to the courtroom. The MHA has recommended that legal experts be embedded at every stage of the investigation process beginning at the point of FIR registration and continuing through to prosecution. The reasoning is pragmatic: building airtight legal cases against terror perpetrators requires as much institutional rigour before trial as it does in the field.
The policy also draws attention to a pattern that has become increasingly common in transnational terrorism foreign-based groups leveraging local outfits for their knowledge of terrain, logistics, and community networks to launch attacks. Addressing this, the document says, demands not just national action but sustained international and regional cooperation.
Seven Pillars, One Framework
PRAHAAR is more than a policy statement it is also an acronym, with each letter representing one of seven strategic pillars that together form the architecture of India’s new counter-terrorism approach:
P stands for Prevention — stopping attacks before they occur to protect Indian citizens and national interests.
R stands for Response — ensuring that when threats materialise, the state’s reaction is swift and proportionate.
A stands for Aggregation — bringing together the capabilities of multiple government agencies to operate in true synergy.
H stands for Human Rights — embedding rule-of-law principles and rights-based processes into every phase of threat mitigation.
A stands for Attenuation — addressing the underlying conditions that make radicalisation and recruitment possible in the first place.
A stands for Alignment — actively shaping and coordinating with international efforts to counter terrorism globally.
R stands for Recovery — building societal resilience so that communities can absorb, adapt, and rebuild in the aftermath of attacks.
A Policy Whose Time Has Come
PRAHAAR arrives at a moment when the nature of terrorism is changing faster than most governments can track. The convergence of geopolitical instability, technological acceleration, and porous digital borders has rendered older security doctrines increasingly inadequate.
India’s answer, at least on paper, is a framework that is at once more integrated, more anticipatory, and more globally aware than anything it has formally articulated before. Whether PRAHAAR translates from policy document to operational reality will depend on implementation on agencies talking to each other, on legal systems keeping pace with investigators, and on a government willing to treat counter-terrorism not as a crisis-response function, but as a permanent, living institution. That work, by all indications, has only just begun.
This article is based on the National Counter-Terrorism Policy and Strategy document released by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs on February 23, 2025.