Cut-Rate Terror

The recent grenade attack outside the BJP’s Punjab headquarters in Chandigarh was not a spectacular act of terror but a cheap, modular and outsourced one directed by handlers in Europe, backed by Pakistan’s ISI and executed by a loose network of local recruits. That such an attack could be mounted so easily and so cheaply ought to worry the Punjab government far more than the blast itself.

The emerging details are grimly instructive. The attackers were promised a modest sum of Rs. two lakh, ferried arms through a relay of operatives, and relied on local knowledge to plan their escape. Some worked as ride-hailing drivers. One had a record of petty crime. This was not a hardened terror cell but a plug-and-play network which was assembled quickly, deployed cheaply and crucially, undetected until it struck.

Pakistan’s ISI has adapted such methods before. Punjab now confronts its latest iteration - a gig economy of terror, where foreign handlers tap into pools of underemployed, lightly policed youth.

The responsibility for this security slip must lie with Punjab’s Aam Aadmi Party government, which has strained to advertise itself as a model of clean governance. The state has, in recent years, has witnessed rising crime in form of gangland killings with cross-border linkages, the re-emergence of radical elements, and a narcotics economy that often doubles as a logistics network for arms.

The AAP government’s response has been curiously unfocused. Energies have been spent on political messaging, administrative theatrics, and turf battles with the BJP-ruled Centre. Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s administration has often appeared more invested in headline management than in the slow, invisible work of intelligence-building. The work of strengthening intelligence coordination across districts and with neighbouring states has sorely lagged behind.

The Chandigarh attack underscores that failure. The operation cut across Punjab, Haryana and the Union Territory. It involved handlers in Portugal and Germany.

The deeper vulnerability is social as much as institutional. A pool of young men, precariously employed and loosely monitored, is proving susceptible to recruitment. This reflects a state that has not adequately integrated its margins, economically or administratively. If anything, the grenade attack on the BJP office proves how Punjab’s much-discussed unemployment crisis is fast becoming a security liability. The political context only deepens the failure. Relations between Punjab’s AAP government and the BJP-led Centre have been marked by constant friction, administrative stand-offs and a reflexive tendency to assign blame rather than share responsibility. In such an atmosphere, security coordination becomes collateral damage. In a border state facing a persistent external threat, such adversarial federalism is dangerous.

To govern Punjab is to govern its risks. The state carries the memory of insurgency, the burden of a porous border, and the complexities of a transnational diaspora. Security, in such a context, must be relentless. It is time the AAP woke up to this fact.