Home Ministry says a nationwide sweep broke up a terror network before Independence Day
Home Minister Amit Shah announced the sweep against the network of Shahzad Bhatti, a Pakistani handler the NIA has tied to a run of grenade attacks in Punjab and Haryana. Those held are suspects; the cases remain under investigation.
India’s security agencies detained 253 people across 14 states in a coordinated operation on 12 August, three days before the 80th Independence Day, against a network the Union Home Ministry says is run from Pakistan and backed by its Inter-Services Intelligence. The ministry said the sweep pre-empted the network’s plans to disrupt Independence Day events.
The ministry gave two figures for the operation: 253 people detained and more than 200 arrested. It said the agencies had registered more than 80 first information reports under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Arms Act, the Explosive Substances Act and the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. The largest numbers came from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Punjab; the operation also reached Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Gujarat, Bihar, Telangana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Kerala.
Investigators recovered improvised explosive devices, grenades bearing Pakistan Ordnance Factory markings, pistols and live cartridges, according to the ministry, along with CCTV cameras it said the network had used to survey police, defence and religious sites. Home Minister Amit Shah announced the operation and described it as foiling the network’s plans for “subversive attacks”.
The handler and the case record
The ministry named the network for Shahzad Bhatti, a Pakistani national the National Investigation Agency has been pursuing for more than a year. The agencies describe him as a gangster turned handler who recruits and directs operatives inside India from across the border. It is a pattern the security establishment has flagged for years: the organiser stays in Pakistan while the people who would carry out an attack stay in India.
That description rests on a documented trail, not on this month’s arrests alone. The NIA has tied Bhatti to three attacks on the police in the past year. It named him as an absconder in an April chargesheet over a March 2025 grenade attack on a home in Jalandhar. In May it chargesheeted nine people, including Bhatti and a second Pakistan-based handler, over the grenade attack on the Sirsa women’s police station in Haryana on 25 November 2025. And it has linked him to the January blast at the Baldev Nagar police station in Ambala. The Sirsa chargesheet, filed before the special NIA court in Panchkula, describes a conspiracy to spread fear by striking police stations. It says Bhatti drew in and radicalised recruits over social media and encrypted apps, and ran his modules through a principal operative based in India.
A network spread thin
That pattern is what makes the sweep more than an arrest tally. A network built this way separates the roles a single cell once held: the handler abroad, the money, the weapons, the reconnaissance and the people who would carry out an attack can each sit in a different state, joined only by a phone. Breaking it up turns less on any one arrest than on fusing scattered transactions, movements and messages into a single picture, which is what the seized phones and cameras will now feed.
It also fits a shift the agencies have described for some time: from investigating an attack after it happens to disrupting a network before it acts. On the ministry’s account, that is what 12 August did. The operation moved against the network on intelligence, ahead of any attack, rather than in the wreckage of one.
What is not yet settled
How complete the disruption is will not be clear for a while. The ministry has not made public the details of any specific plot against Independence Day, and its case now has to hold up in court. Those detained are suspects, not convicts; some of the 253 may be released, and the courts will weigh the arrests against the evidence the agencies say they have gathered.
The harder question is one the recoveries cannot answer. A network run from outside the country, with its leadership beyond India’s reach, can lose its local modules and set about building new ones. The real measure of this operation is whether Bhatti’s network can still recruit, finance and arm operatives after this month. The answer will come long after the arrest count has faded from the news.
For now the government is claiming a success of the hardest kind to prove: an attack that did not happen. Whether it stands up depends on the evidence the agencies can put before a court.
Sources: Union Home Ministry statement on the operation of 12 August 2026, as reported by Republic, Outlook, The Tribune, Kerala Kaumudi and others; National Investigation Agency chargesheets in the Sirsa (27 May 2026) and Jalandhar (April 2026) cases, and NIA statements linking Shahzad Bhatti to the Ambala blast.