In the bustling lanes of downtown Kanpur, an unusual silence hangs over the home of Dr Zafar Hayat. He speaks in a tired, almost hushed tone about Dr Shaheen Saeed, his former wife and mother to his two children. The family is still coming to terms with the fact that she is an accused in the conspiracy behind the Red Fort blast on November 10, which killed 15 civilians and the suicide bomber, Dr Umar Un Nabi of Faridabad’s Al Falah University.
Their first response is denial—not only of her alleged role, but also her memory. “My elder son is 20 and the younger one is still in school,” says Hayat. “They were very small when we got divorced (2013) and she left. The younger one hardly has any memory of Shaheen, and the older one is busy studying medicine and avoids social media. We have our own life and don’t meet too many people.”
An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Kanpur, Hayat is understandably uncomfortable with the media glare on his family. “I had no inkling of her extremist ideas. She was a good mother...,” his voice trails off.
Investigators say that Saeed, who also worked at Al Falah University, was part of a core terror module that included Maulvi Irfan Ahmad Wagay of Shopian, who delivered sermons in Nowgam’s local mosques, and three radicalised doctors—Dr Adeel Ahmed Rather, a native of Anantnag, working in Saharanpur; Dr Muzammil Shakeel Ganai of Pulwama; and the suicide bomber Nabi. They were assisted by a wider ecosystem of footsoldiers, financiers, logistical suppliers and sympathisers, who worked in tandem to execute the plot.
The scale of involvement, say officials, indicates that the operation was planned over months. In fact, two months before the module was busted, Adeel’s elder brother Muzaffar is said to have left for Afghanistan. Investigators say Nabi was meant to leave with him, but stayed back to execute the plans handed down by the masterminds.
RISE OF THE RADICALS
Senior security officials say the case reflects a deep-rooted resurgence of radicalisation where educated youth, with no physical training or history of cross-border travel, were defying the conventional terrorist playbook and turning to violent extremism through online indoctrination.
Radicalisation in the past 25 years has not solely been driven by socioeconomic deprivation. Engineers, doctors and academics have at times surfaced in terror investigations under different banners, from Azamgarh’s Dr Shahnawaz and Pune’s techie Mansoor Peerbhoy of Indian Mujahideen in 2008 to Zubair Hangargekar, a software engineer arrested by the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad on October 27 for allegedly supporting Al Qaeda’s call to establish a caliphate.
“While conventional recruitment into militant ranks has dropped, and enforcement of law has worked, [there is still a] deeper ideological undercurrent,” says R.R. Swain, former director general of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. “This itself is evidence that our battle with online propaganda and false narratives is not going well.” Deradicalisation policies drafted a few years ago, he says, cannot succeed without families and communities stepping in.
In 2016-17, the Maharashtra ATS created a deradicalisation model to prevent the Islamic State from recruiting educated professionals disillusioned with sociopolitical systems. It relied on a community-based approach and rehabilitated 450 individuals. This model formed the basis for deradicalisation guidelines issued by the Bureau of Police Research and Development for state police forces. But whether these guidelines were implemented and support systems were actually created requires detailed assessment.
“No family consciously raises a child to embrace a radicalised ideology,” says Prashant Kumar, former director general of Uttar Pradesh Police. “Terror-mongers in public spaces and online platforms brainwash them gradually. As agencies cannot monitor private online spaces, the role of families becomes crucial.”
Kumar cautions against branding an entire group of professionals from a particular community as terrorists, arguing that it would risk alienating more youth. Also, what is equally important is to understand that radicalisation among the educated is still an exception in India. “How many white-collar professionals have actually picked up the gun? Very few,” says Swain. “But when a handful get radicalised at this level, their impact is disproportionately large.”
While it might seem shocking, the fact that more educated people are being radicalised is apparent from the raw data accessed from Islamic State recruits in recent years. “An analysis of this data reveals that less than 2 per cent were uneducated,” says Tara Kartha, former director at the National Security Council Secretariat. “The suicide declaration by Umar reflects almost exactly the ‘teachings’ of the ISIS, which is widely available on the dark web. As an imported ideology, this has not been internalised in India till now despite the best efforts of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, who control at least one ISIS grouping in Afghanistan.”
Therefore, this first ingress, she says, needs to be pushed back with sensitive counter-terrorism tactics, even while pursuing all hard options to end the current module. That the investigations have already spanned four states is worrying, and more is expected to come out gradually.
SYSTEMIC FAILURES: ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK
A series of systemic failures—from intelligence gathering and law enforcement to forensic labs, education and industry oversight—appears to have culminated in the current security breach.
First, the highly sophisticated National Intelligence Grid, set up to ensure timely intelligence sharing, missed early signs until Srinagar Senior Superintendent of Police Dr Sundeep Chakravarthy stumbled upon multiple Jaish-e-Mohammad posters at different locations in Nowgam issuing threats to security forces. His alert led to arrests, including that of ideologue Wagay, whose records showed links to JeM and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind dating back to 2019, the year of the Pulwama attack.
Two weeks later, the police followed the trail to Al Falah University. “Till then, there was no local intelligence on any suspicious activity inside the university,” admitted a security official in Haryana.
The haul of more than 3,000kg of ammonium nitrate from a cleric’s secluded house and another room rented by Ganai averted a major attack. But chinks in the security armour were evident: Nabi slipped out with explosives, crossed state borders and waited undetected for hours before the blast.
The absence of robust, ground-level networks—from local beat constables to community informants, particularly in the hinterland—continues to be the weakest link in counter-terror efforts.
“Building ground-level intelligence is a much neglected area today as police forces invest in facial recognition, smart detectors and AI analytics,” says Yashovardhan Azad, former special director in the Intelligence Bureau. “This has resulted in an over-reliance on technology at the cost of human intelligence.”
What is also worrying is the easy availability of explosive material like ammonium nitrate. More than a decade ago, the Union home ministry had asked the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion to barcode packets of ammonium nitrate, largely sold as fertiliser. But pilferage remained rampant. The debate soon expanded to barcoding detonators to prevent misuse. India, one of the world’s major detonator exporters, faced resistance over potential price increase. “The easy access to ammonium nitrate has been a constant worry. It is high time procurement and sales mechanisms are tightened,” says Azad.
Another glaring lapse emerged after the Enforcement Directorate found that Al Falah University had put up a false accreditation certificate on its website and had misappropriated funds; this was not noticed till the terror plot came to light.
“It is worrisome when educational institutions become breeding grounds for radicalisation,” says Swain. “(While a bulk of terror recruits came from Kashmir), this trend is not limited to J&K, but is an equal concern in hinterland states as well.”
Investigators believe some members of the Faridabad module may have been part of sleeper cells, activated only now, and that they likely had no contact with those in the first phase of the operation. “These [JeM] posters were probably put up by footsoldiers who the doctors never even met,” said an official in J&K, pointing to the possibility of micro modules operating across Faridabad, Saharanpur, Kanpur and elsewhere.
EVIDENCE IS KEY: FILLING THE GAPS IN INVESTIGATIONS
“The investigation in such cases is always tough, but there are much better tools available for forensic analysis, data collection and analysing evidence,” says Atulchandra Kulkarni, former NIA special director. “There is also greater synergy between Central and state police forces.”
It is always a tightrope walk for investigators to take terror cases to a logical conclusion in courts as identities are hidden, finances are masked and footprints are made invisible using highly sophisticated techniques. There have been instances when those arrested have walked free because of tardy investigation.
In the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case, police relied heavily on the confessional statements of the accused as they were recorded under MCoCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act) and held evidential value during trial. But the High Court, while acquitting all the accused recently, said: “Confessional statements were not found to be truthful and complete on various grounds; some portions of the same were found to be similar and copied.” The court also observed that the accused established that they were tortured for confessions. “That case is a classic example of how investigations can go wrong,” said a former police officer, explaining why forensic and scientifically gathered evidence is the need of the hour.
WORRIES BEYOND DELHI
The Delhi strike comes six months after India carried out a military response to the Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 civilians. According to senior officials, these developments are linked. Investigators found at least two JeM handlers, Umar and Hashim, on the encrypted platform Telegram, interacting with nearly two dozen doctors and young professionals discussing geopolitics, ongoing wars and cross-border conflicts. Pakistan army chief Asim Munir’s decision to send senior military officers to funerals of terrorists killed during Operation Sindoor had won praise by JeM operatives.
Notably, India’s assessment of Pakistan’s role in sponsoring terror has been debated by western policymakers of late. The former US Central Command chief General Michael Kurilla, who praised Pakistan for being a ‘phenomenal partner’ in counter-terror efforts, has once again brought focus to the transactional US-Pakistan relationship, which has been restored out of necessity more than once. “Over the years, sufficient evidence has been shared with Pakistan of the terror machinery operating against India,” says G.K. Pillai, former Union home secretary. “But the isolation of the terrorist groups, whether it is the Islamic State groupings like IS Khorasan Province (ISKP) supported by ISI in Afghanistan or the JeM in Pakistan, will only be possible if the fight against terror gets global support.” The ISKP is learnt to have moved its operational base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Balochistan province, demonstrating a shifting terror landscape in the region.
Veterans in India’s security establishment warn that demanding accountability will become increasingly difficult as extremist sentiment rises across the neighbourhood, including in Bangladesh, where several high-ranking Pakistani military officers have recently visited to reset defence and trade ties. For Delhi, the priority must be to set its own house in order by fixing gaps in intelligence gathering, sharing and prevention.
While corrective measures lie with policymakers in Sardar Patel Bhawan, prevention begins with ordinary citizens resisting the proponents of radical ideas.