Archisman Goswami

Once more, as in centuries past, wars are rather easily started and then fought without perceptible restraint – remarked noted strategic theorist Edward Luttwak in his 1995 essay on the re-emergence of what he glumly termed ‘Post-Heroic Warfare’. “Present circumstances call for even more than a new concept of war, but for a new mentality that would inject unheroic realism into military endeavour precisely to overcome excessive timidity in employing military means”.

Luttwak’s assertions, capturing the strategic zeitgeist of the post-Cold War era and written primarily in relation to contemporary military tactics, could well have been written yesterday. The attempted mutiny by Wagner mercenaries in Russia this summer, and the subsequent mysterious death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin testifies to the fact that the modern global security arena is characterised both by the resurgence of state competition, and the increased salience of private security actors and the “weaponisation of everything”. As strategic competitors to India such as China openly championing their strategy of ‘Unrestricted Warfare’ and blurring the lines between state and the private sector in national security affairs, there is yet time to acknowledge the ‘unheroic realism’ and lack of ‘perceptible restraint’ still guiding hostile strategic interactions in our brave new decade.

Perhaps nowhere are these confluent facets- a lack of restraint, the blurring of lines between state and non-state actors in the security arena, and the ‘weaponisation of everything’– more evident than with regards to private intelligence companies (PICs), whose role within geopolitical competition has remained relatively understudied in comparison to its martial counterpart, private military companies (PMCs). Like the latter, the former provides plausible deniability for both states and high net-worth individuals (HNIs) willing to pay the requisite fees for their services. As such, the expanding role of PICs presents novel counterintelligence risks and opportunities for countries such as India, which must contend with the possibility of their use by countries such as China, but also to a lesser extent, Pakistan. This article seeks to identify some of these risks and outline recommendations to counter them from an Indian perspective.

PICs: A brief explainer

The emergence of PICs dovetails that of the modern national intelligence service in the 19th century. As early as the 1860s, Pinkerton, among the world’s oldest PICs still in operation, was tasked by the administration of Abraham Lincoln with conducting counterintelligence operations against the Confederacy during the American Civil War – a responsibility that it pursued alongside “strikebreaking” and “unionbusting” workers on behalf of individual tycoons and wealthy corporations during America’s so-called ‘Gilded Age’. In line with this temporal setting, the popular image of a privately-hired spy remains associated with that of the stereotypical private investigator – a Chandleresque, trench-coated and trilby-hatted shadowy figure skulking around a street corner.

Over a century on, PICs maintain a close – though not always even-tempered –  relationship with governments, often being provided with legal/political protection by the latter in exchange for their services and the promise of plausible deniability in intelligence operations. In the 1990s, the fledgling Russian Federation, under Boris Yeltsin, tasked US PIC Kroll in 1992 with tracking down funds siphoned away from the state during the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the same company being contracted by the Filipino and Kuwaiti governments to gather intelligence on Ferdinand Marcos’ and Saddam Hussein’s secret bank accounts respectively. More recently, governments such as Iran and China have been known to use PICs to spy on dissidents and conduct covert operations against adversary states. However, this relationship has not been universally equanimous. The so-called ‘Trump dossier’, supposedly containing kompromat on the then newly-elected President of the USA, Donald Trump, was released in 2017 by spy-for-hire Christopher Steele- contracted by Fusion GPS, a Washington DC-based “opposition research firm”. Beyond governments, HNIs may also seek to defend their interests or target governments using PICs, with private intelligence operatives hired by Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, claiming in 2019 to have obtained evidence of the Saudi government hacking his cell phone.

With their centrality thus established in both politics and business, it is no wonder that the private intelligence sector today is a multi-million-dollar industry. In London, seen by many as the PIC capital of the world, the private intelligence industry is estimated to be worth as high as $19 billion, serving clients ranging from finance and legal firms, high net-worth individuals, and even governments. PICs such as Hakluyt, Black Cube, and most notably, firms such as Bellingcat have all made their mark on the modern global security landscape. As the lines blur between civilian society and its associated legal, financial and political institutions on one hand, and the strategic realm on the other, it may be forecast that PICs will only grow in terms of both financial and geopolitical importance. It is in this regard that India, with its growing clout on the global stage and status as a regional power, must account for the new counterintelligence challenges posed by the deployment of PICs by adversary states for strategic gain.

PICs: India and Counterintelligence challenges for the 2020s

With national security in the 21st Century necessitating greater liaison between governments and the private sector, one of the accompanying risks of such public-private partnership may be argued to be the increased scope it offers for PIC interference. Indeed, like most other global powers, India in recent years has expanded technical cooperation between the state and the private sector, particularly in the fields of cybersecurity and space technology. While central to India’s national security needs, the pursuit of public-private partnerships must be done in consideration of the ease it provides to PICs, hired by adversary states, to access state secrets. Unlike intra and inter-governmental interactions, the private sector lends itself to greater internal transparency – something which may be exploited by PICs. Given the fact that PICs themselves operate in the free market, their cohabitation of this space with private companies with close ties to the government holds the potential to allow the compromise of strategic interests, and give India’s adversaries a competitive advantage – comprising a significant counterintelligence challenge in the process.

A more imminent risk lies in the use of PICs by adversary states to interfere in India’s political and electoral processes, or those of countries. While ‘covert action’ as conducted by PICs remains among the most opaque aspects of their activity, their forays into the spheres of disinformation and election interference have been well recorded in recent years, ranging from ‘Team Jorge’s’ alleged interference in Kenya’s recent elections on behalf of key candidates, to the hiring of PIC ‘Team Alpha’ by South Korea’s intelligence agencies to interfere in the country’s own elections. Global precedents aside, India is no stranger to the involvement of PICs in electoral processes, with political candidates having long been alleged to have used Indian PICs to gather information on their rivals, much like their international counterparts. The weaponisation of PICs by adversary states such as China, however, may lend a more sinister touch to such activities, with the use of PICs to spread disinformation, or to support/undermine specific candidates having key national security implications for India.

Beyond the dissemination of black or grey propaganda, however, PICs may be actively used to harm or harass Indian diplomats, or persons of interest on behalf of hostile states, but also high net-worth individuals and economic offenders based abroad. Once again, precedent points towards the possible use of private spies by economic offenders based abroad to obfuscate or subvert legal proceedings aimed at their extradition back to India. Similarly, PICs may be used to stalk or otherwise badger Indian nationals and diplomats, particularly in third countries where law enforcement have been known to demonstrate laxity towards such issues. Possibilities range from simple stalking and physical surveillance, to more intimidatory tactics such as the staging of break-ins, or hacking/tapping sensitive computer systems or phone lines. The use of such tactics- which may serve to help both hostile states such as China seeking to undermine Indian strategic interests, or absconding tycoons seeking an edge in legal cases filed against them in foreign courts- must be accounted for by central agencies developing new counterintelligence strategies against private spies.

Future Scope and Recommendations

Using PICs, or any private security actor more generally, is always a double-edged sword. While they may provide governments with plausible deniability to avoid embarrassment or diplomatic retaliation, their mercenary nature may equally present challenges the nation’s strategic interests, especially if the balance of power between themselves and the state tips towards the former due to existing circumstances- as the mutiny by Wagner mercenaries in Russia this summer and the subsequent mysterious death of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash shows. It is with these considerations in mind that one may present the following recommendations for Indian counterintelligence practitioners in dealing with them.

First, third-party individuals or organisations with reliably tied in with Indian strategic interests may be used to liaise with large PICs and to develop contacts within them. In Western countries, particularly the UK, US and Canada, where the private intelligence industry is more organised and active, these intermediaries may include industrialists, journalists, and other influential figures with connections within both local diaspora communities and the financial/political establishment. Brokers such as these may be used to provide information about the distinct functioning of PICs in relation to their local environments, while facilitating access to their internal plans- even as they add to the distance between these companies and India’s local diplomatic presence to avoid embarrassment or the compromise of information. These tactics of adaptive denial would also aid Indian authorities in developing a better understanding of PICs, and the risks and opportunities they pose in terms of counterintelligence.

Second, and from a legalistic standpoint, India may consider amendments to domestic laws regulating private detective/intelligence agencies. While the government did pass the Private Detective Agencies (Regulation) Bill in 2007, which from a counterintelligence perspective, reflected some limited efforts to prevent their use by adversary states against Indian interests- for instance, only allowing Indian citizens to operate as registered private detectives in the country, and making such agencies register with the government. Sixteen years on, however, the insufficiency of these measures are clearer than ever.

The emergence of insider threats have made questions surrounding citizenship increasingly irrelevant in the counterintelligence sector- as seen in the recent arrests of former naval officer Ashish Pathak and freelance journalist Vivek Raghuvanshi for spying for unnamed foreign powers. The existing laws may be amended by introducing provisions for random and regular ‘re-vetting’ of private detectives/ spies, and the provision of additional powers to the Intelligence Bureau to investigate the activities of such agencies operating at home.

Third, the national security establishment may consider establishing specialised units to advise and oversee the security procedures implemented by private companies working with the government on sensitive projects. Regular auditing of these partners security procedures, liaising with their insider threat detection units (and aiding their establishment if non-existent), and the development of common strategies would not only prevent the risk of foreign PIC operatives compromising India’s interests, but also increase trust and cooperation between the state and its private partners on joint projects.

Offensive tactics may also be considered when dealing with hostile PICs, and the government may be well advised to countervail them by utilising other PICs itself. However, if it chooses to do so, it would be worth considering the potential counterintelligence risks of their use- including the potentiality of information being compromised by these mercenary actors, and the associated risks of increased access to the state by private actors driven by profit.

The interplay between market forces, represented by PICs, and better-defined state actors, is one that despite its apparent novelty, simply illustrates the broad spectrum of actors that India has had to deal with in the past, and will have to continue dealing with in the future. For New Delhi to be successful in this endeavour, it will have to acknowledge their associated risks and opportunities- and account more explicitly for them in its future pursuit of counterintelligence.

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Practice has proved that cognitive domain operations have broken the traditional online and offline data barriers. Through the integrated use of telecommunication networks, the Internet, the Internet of Things and other channels, and with the help of advanced algorithms, the initiator can effectively switch between various spaces and optimize the combat style, and even focus on private spaces and public spaces to accurately release interference information, so as to achieve effects that cannot be achieved by traditional combat methods.

In future cognitive domain operations, the influence of rational factors such as science and logic on individual cognition is likely to be weakened, and cognitive confrontation may become a contest between emotions and emotions.

At present, the rapid development of intelligent technology is changing the logic of information dissemination in an all-round way, making the impact of information on thinking and consciousness more profound and comprehensive, and human brain cognition has truly risen to an important field of military confrontation. In the era of intelligence, the continuous evolution of the information dissemination mechanism will systematically reshape cognitive confrontation from many aspects, thereby promoting fundamental changes in cognitive domain operations.

Artificial intelligence becomes the main driver of cognitive domain operations

In the era of intelligence, information dissemination is based on data, and artificial intelligence technology runs through the entire process of information collection, production, and feedback. The extensive and in-depth application of artificial intelligence, a disruptive technology in the military field, will be the key support for the entire process of future cognitive domain combat planning and implementation.

Artificial intelligence technology will run through multiple scenarios of future cognitive domain operations. In the process of deployment and rhythm control of combat operations in the cognitive domain, all parties involved rely on advanced algorithms as the “regulators” and “gatekeepers” of actions, and a large amount of information about battlefield actions from various combat domains provides information for all parties to the war. Efficient decision-making and implementation of cognitive domain operations provide the driving force. Practice has proved that cognitive domain operations have broken the traditional online and offline data barriers. Through the integrated use of telecommunication networks, the Internet, the Internet of Things and other channels, with the help of advanced algorithms, the initiator can effectively switch between various spaces and optimize the combat style. It even focuses on private spaces and public spaces to accurately release interference information, so as to achieve effects that cannot be achieved by traditional combat methods.

In addition, artificial intelligence has evolved from empowering a single link to connecting all links of combat and the entire process. At present, artificial intelligence is limited to locating target audiences in information dissemination to improve the matching rate of information and destinations. In future cognitive domain operations, artificial intelligence will play a “one-stop” role in the planning and implementation of cognitive domain operations, and will continue to strengthen the coupling between various links. The foreign military believes that in future cognitive domain operations, differentiated delivery of data can be used to activate robots to instantly create public opinion trends and affect cognitive effects. At the level of strategic campaigns, based on long-term tracking data and continuously adjusted and optimized algorithm strategies, it can measure the cognitive situation of different regions and groups, and assist decision makers in planning core narratives and major issues, thereby regulating the implementation of actions and coordinated actions.

Autonomous confrontation has become a prominent feature of cognitive domain operations

With the continuous expansion of intelligent programs from collaborative communication, participatory communication to autonomous communication, and the connected ecology of smart terminals, officers and soldiers will increasingly be able to receive various types of information sent by smart programs and smart terminals on the battlefield in the future. In the virtual space, the interactive communication between digital twins and virtual people will transmit the cognition of people in the real world. From the perspective of the development trend of cognitive domain operations under intelligent conditions, the degree of human intervention will gradually decrease, the collection, synthesis, and transmission of information ammunition will be more autonomous and efficient, and the formulation and execution of discourse strategies and action strategies will become more autonomous. The pace of the whole process is unprecedentedly fast. But as far as the result is concerned, humans are still the ultimate goal of combat in the cognitive domain, and the process of empowerment and acceleration by autonomous weapons will continue to strengthen the control of human cognition.

With the help of autonomous confrontation tools such as intelligent programs, intelligent terminals, digital twins, and virtual humans, all parties participating in the war will have more flexibility in the deployment of cognitive domain combat situations, space-time use, and information content design, and the confrontation between information authenticity and falsehood will be more efficient. protrude. In future cognitive domain operations, autonomous weapons will likely break through the limitations of power and time and space, and their action patterns will become more complex. The practice of foreign militaries shows that the use of the Internet to carry out “spray irrigation” communication for the general public and “drip irrigation” communication for specific groups will become a common pattern of cognitive domain operations. Smart programs and smart terminals can support the development of more and more complex action patterns due to their characteristics of batch replication deployment and non-stop operation. For example, it is possible to quickly mobilize a large number of social robots around specific issues and target specific attack objects, take turns to concentrate and spread information, or use smart devices around specific individuals to collect relevant data, and use dialogue robots, virtual humans and individuals to interact with each other for a long time and continue to guide them achieve combat objectives.

In future cognitive domain operations, autonomous weapons covertly manipulate cognitive domain battlefields will become the norm. Social robots can create fake public opinion and hotspots as needed, thereby generating more fog of individual perception; intelligent synthesis technology will lower the threshold for false information production. As a result, the cost and difficulty of counterfeiting will be increased; robot accounts and virtual human sources will be more difficult to identify, and “one-to-one” cognitive fraud is becoming more and more common.

Emotional Conflict Becomes a Prominent Attribute of Cognitive Domain Operations

In the era of intelligence, new technologies will broaden the scope of human cognition and deepen people’s perception. Extended reality, metaverse and other technologies will more holographically and transparently present the battlefield environment, event scene, etc., and the scene can be touched, felt and interacted, and the audience will be more subject to the influence of perceptual logic when they perceive the truth of the event.

Thanks to the development of the mobile Internet, the rapidity of information dissemination has increased rapidly. Through the centralized release of large batches of information in a short period of time, the response time of individuals can be greatly compressed, making it difficult for individuals to think deeply. Before the full picture of the event is fully displayed, the audience often has formed a position tendency and even turned their attention to a new focus. The mode of outputting conclusions based on fragmented clues intensifies the irrational and emotional response to information. In future cognitive domain operations, the influence of rational factors such as science and logic on individual cognition is likely to be weakened, and cognitive confrontation may become a contest between emotion and emotion. In the choice between resorting to rationality and resorting to sensibility, all parties involved in the war pay more and more attention to moving people with emotion, agitating, occupying and even polarizing the target object’s mind through perceptual means, and leading the confrontation situation in the cognitive domain.

In the era of intelligence, cognitive leverage increasingly relies on emotional competition. On the one hand, cognitive resonance is enhanced with emotional arousal strategies. In future cognitive domain operations, the initiator of the action selectively presents the cruel and fierce battle scenes, post-war scenes, or the process and status quo of soldiers participating in the battle, so as to strongly stimulate the audience’s emotions and awaken the audience’s innermost feelings emotional identity. As a node of the communication network, people can collect various physical signs data through intelligent algorithms, so that the initiators of actions can more accurately study and judge the emotional effects of information, so as to dynamically adjust the content and strengthen emotional responses. Action initiators use data calculations to select groups with similar understanding contexts and the same emotional characteristics, or to select specific individuals who are susceptible and have a greater influence value, and stimulate them through targeted dissemination of homogeneous information flows. Group cognitive resonance.

On the other hand, use the moral coercion strategy to stimulate value recognition. In the face of accumulated and aggravated fragmentation and irrational cognitive response patterns, the initiators of combat operations can occupy the moral high ground through the discourse system of binary opposition, gather the torrent of self-interested value cognition, and then achieve the coercion effect. The rich forms of presentation in the intelligent communication environment and the direct access to the public’s social channels provide a convenient means for action initiators to use this strategy. In local wars in recent years, technological evolution has gradually demonstrated the promotion of moral coercion strategies. For example, social media has exposed the secret diplomacy of the past to the public. The details of communication between the upper echelons and elite groups, etc., and discourse strategies are increasingly emphasizing moral arbitration and criticism, thereby influencing and stimulating the international public to support their own value positions.

The Internet of Everything Expands the Battlefield of Cognitive Domain Operations

With the development of information communication technology, social media has gradually become the main battlefield for shaping cognition. Institutions, individuals and people of all warring parties can directly contact and interact with each other through social media, making all-weather cognitive competition possible.

In the era of intelligent communication, the Internet of Everything has become a new social connection model, and communication subjects and communication behaviors are ubiquitous. Under this influence, the combat space in the cognitive domain will expand to smart IoT terminals and scenarios, and to the two worlds of physical space and virtual space. The Internet of Everything leads to the ubiquity of the combat space in the cognitive domain, which will further promote the ubiquity of combat subjects. Natural persons, intelligent terminals with information sending and receiving capabilities, and even virtual characters in the network world may become combat subjects, and cognitive domain operations will participate in the war. The types of forces will be greatly expanded, and the organizational method of cognitive domain operations will change to distributed coordination.

In future cognitive domain operations, people and machines deep in the conflict will become an important force in combat. With the support of intelligent technology, they will collaborate to draw battlefield pictures and participate in the “writing” of the whole process of war. Soldiers on the frontline continuously share their personal battlefield experiences through social networks, and push them to the world in a timely manner after personalized packaging. Individual equipment and combat platforms will be responsible for battlefield image collection and transmission tasks, and trigger automatic processing and release mechanisms according to preset procedures, cooperate with physical space combat operations in various ways to compete for information control and brain control. With the continuous development of communication technology, frontline soldiers and intelligent equipment can also reprocess and reprocess the information they have in a targeted manner according to the instructions of their superiors, so as to present the battlefield scene they want to express more conveniently and panoramically, to achieve the ultimate goal of fighting in the cognitive domain.

Source: China Military Network – PLA Daily

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The Deputy Director of the Russian Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, Vladimir Drozhzhov, said on the sidelines of the ongoing Aero India 2023 show that the development of this proposed submarine based on Amur 1650 will include a localization level of up to 80%.

This proposal comes when India is looking to sign an agreement to develop diesel-electric submarines under the P-75I this year. The country issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to five foreign contenders, including Russia, in 2021.

According to the RFP, the six planned diesel-electric attack submarines are expected to include advanced capabilities such as Air-independent propulsion (AIP), Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), Special operations forces (SOF), Anti-ship warfare (AShW), Anti-submarine warfare (ASW), Anti-surface warfare (ASuW), Land-attack capabilities, and other features.

However, the programme hangs in the balance after most foreign manufacturers that received the RFP, including Russia, decided against competing for the project. While proposing the co-development of the all-new sub, Drozhzhov acknowledged that Russia had backed out of Project 75I’s tender.

“Along with this, we offer our Indian partners a variant of cooperation on this topic, including the joint designing and production of a national non-nuclear submarine under the 75 (I) program based on an intergovernmental agreement,” the Russian official said.

“Taking into account our experience of working with the Indian side on other naval projects, localization of production during the implementation of the program for the construction of Project-75 (I) submarines based on the Russian platform Amur-1650 can be increased to 70-80%.”

Foreign contenders that received the RFP from India withdrew from the tender for two reasons – qualitative requirements with a particular emphasis on Lithium cell Air-Independent Propulsion and a strict liability clause that puts the obligation on the foreign partner for the submarines’ performance despite them being built in Indian shipyards.

Currently, Project 75I has only a single vendor, i.e., a South Korean company that is the only bidder offering a proven fuel cell air-independent propulsion (AIP) system.

Some reports earlier suggested that the project may even be shelved. However, the Navy Chief expressed the service’s commitment to the program before Navy day in December last year.

Several delays have already marred the project. Russia’s proposal, thus, comes at an opportune moment.

Russian Amur-1650 Submarine

Rosoboronexport describes the Amur 1650 as a diesel-electric submarine that belongs to a new generation of Russian non-nuclear submarines. According to the exporter, the vessel has been designed specially to destroy hostile navy surface combatants, transports, and submarines and lead reconnaissance parties.

Regardless of the weather, the Amur 1650 submarine can complete vital global missions. This is significant as India is looking to significantly augment its naval fleet to combat PLA Navy’s expanding presence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).

The submarine is equipped with a powerful sonar system with low noise, high levels of automation, and the capacity to fire both torpedoes and the Club-S missile system. As per a report published in TASS in 2019, the submarine that is proposed to be jointly developed by India and Russia would also be equipped with BrahMos cruise missiles.

The submarine can carry anti-ship cruise missiles, adaptable deep-water torpedoes, and mines. It can attack enemy territory-wide terrestrial targets. The data required to launch missiles and torpedoes is created and fed into the submarine’s automated command information system.

The Amur 1650 submarine can have a fuel cell air-independent propulsion system installed, extending its underwater travel time by up to 20 days. The AIP is a core requirement of the diesel-attack submarine to be built under Project 75I and has led to most contenders withdrawing from the tender.

Further, an attack periscope with optical and video linkages (night vision included) and an optronic non-penetrating mast are incorporated into the periscope module of the submarine. The pole is also equipped with antennas for catching signals from satellite navigation systems and radars.

The GLONASS and GPS receivers in the navigation system allow for the precise determination of the submarine’s current location and the motion parameters required for safe navigation and the use of weapons.

A trailing antenna is part of the automated radio communication system and is used to receive secure command signals and data communications at depths of up to 100 meters.

Project 75I will take place under the strategic partnership model, and the capabilities will be developed in conjunction with domestic private players. India has stressed that it needs a higher level of indigenization, including in production.

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These religious setups have mushroomed within 10 km from the Nepal border and also across the border in the Nepal side, leading to demographic change in some parts of the border areas in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, the report has said.

Quoting intelligence inputs, officials said that in the last three years, the number of mosques has gone up from 760 in 2018 to 1,000 in 2021, while the number of madrasas has risen from 508 in 2018 to 645 in 2021 in Nepali territories, officials said.

The sources in the security grid said that these religious setups are being been funded by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other anti-India organistions working abroad. The officials in the security forces have admitted that the size and grandeur of these mosques and madrasas itself indicate foreign fundings, and apart from the ISI, these religious houses also get fundings from Arab countries.

The security officials deployed on the India-Nepal border said that these centres have been instigating anti-India sentiments and they also give shelter to criminals active in the border areas of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

“These areas have also seen a spurt of smuggling of fake Indian currency notes and narcotics, and there is no extradition treaty agreement with Nepal,” a government official said.

Officials in the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar governments have also admitted that criminals often take shelter in these religious places after committing crimes as the India-Nepal border is unfenced and porous. The Integrated Check Posts have been set up on the major roads but the village roads leading to Nepal are unguarded, they added.

India shares 1,751-km borders with Nepal along Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim, while Uttar Pradesh shares a 570-km border with Nepal and has 35 border police stations. Similarly, Bihar and West Bengal also share 726 km and 100 km border with Nepal, respectively.

“The majority of construction of mosques, madrasas and mosque-cum-madrasas have been flagged in Uttar Pradesh’s border districts of Maharajganj, Siddharth Nagar, Balrampur, Bahraich, Shravasti, Pilibhit and Khiri, while Kishanganj and Araria in Bihar and Panitanki town of Darjeeling district in West Bengal have seen such rise in last three years,” an official in the central security grid said.

In recent years, the Himalayan state has been used by Pakistan-based terror groups as safe havens and the Indian agencies have substantial evidences as to how the Nepalese banks have also been playing a crucial role in terror-funding against India.

In 2019, the Uttar Pradesh Police had busted an international terrorism funding racket linked to Nepal’s central bank and they claimed the involvement of Indian nationals who used to bring money from Nepal and use it to fund terrorist activities in the country.

The chief of dreaded terror organisation Indian Mujahideen, Yasin Bhatkal, and his aide Asadulah Akhtar, who were from Pokhra in Nepal, were hiding there after carrying out a series of bomb blasts in India in 2013. Bhatkal was arrested on August 2013 from the Nepal border near Motihari in East Champaran district in Bihar.

Describing the enormity of the security threat posed by these religious setups in Nepal, retired IPS officer Vijay Shankar Singh said that these setups are being funded by the ISI, and the Government of India needs to speak to the Nepal government immediately to stop anti-India activities.

“India needs to focus on re-strengthening its ties with Nepal, which has been a natural ally of India historically. We have the ‘Beti- Roti’ relation with Nepal from hundred years ago, there is a matrimonial relationship between families residing in the border areas of Bihar and UP with Nepalese people,” Singh said.

He also said that the proposed rail and road connectivity from China has also changed Nepal’s allegiance towards China and the Communist-backed government in the Himalayan nation has almost dumped India.

In recent times, Pakistan and China supported Nepal financially in many infrastructure projects which has led to a swift change in alliance with these countries.

Nepal, the land-locked country, was totally dependent on India for import but recently China has promised a 417 km long rail link up to Kathmandu from the Chinese section Shigaste.

Beijing and Kathmandu signed a treaty in 2016 to build a rail link to Nepal under China’s Belt and Road Initiatives. A ‘Friendship Highway’ of 806 km is being constructed to connect Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, with Nepal border which is about to be completed soon.

Citing his experience as Senior Superintendent of Police in eastern Uttar Pradesh districts, Singh said that the Indian security agencies need to keep an eye on the people who frequently visit these mosques and madarsas and the Indian government needs to use diplomatic channels to stop these activities along the India-Nepal border.

He also said that the majority of the population in both the countries are in favour of having smooth relations as they are historically and culturally associated with each other.

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