Inside India’s Blacklisting of 23 Rawalpindi Handlers

In a massive blow to the cross-border terror apparatus operating under Rawalpindi’s protective umbrella, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has officially designated 23 Pakistan-based operatives as individual terrorists. Issued under Section 35 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), this decisive legal action by the Modi government ruthlessly strips away any remaining layers of deniability from Pakistan’s proxy war machine.  

This is the single largest addition to the UAPA Individual Terrorist list since the law was amended in 2019 to black-list individual operators rather than just their parent fronts. With these 23 entries added to the Fourth Schedule, the total tally of designated individual terrorists under Indian law has climbed from 57 to 80.   

The Break-Down: Traitors and Deep-State Proxies

The list comprises 17 Pakistani nationals and 6 Indian nationals who turned traitor. However, their legal identities are secondary to their current reality: every single one of these 23 individuals operates comfortably from active safe houses inside mainland Pakistan or across Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK).  

They serve as the vital connective tissue for banned, blood-soaked terror syndicates, including:

 Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)

 Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)  

 Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD)  

 The Resistance Front (TRF) — a proxy front designed to mask cross-border terror under a local label.  

The Crimes Behind the Designations

The MHA’s gazette notifications expose these handlers not as random field fighters, but as high-level logistics coordinators and ideological masterminds. Their primary operations focus on weaponizing social media to radicalize local youth, coordinating drone-based arms deliveries, managing terror financing pipelines, and planning high-profile attacks.  

Specifically, the notifications directly link these newly designated entities to major historical strikes on Indian security personnel, including:

 The November 29, 2016, suicide attack on the Indian Army camp at Nagrota.  

 The April 22, 2022, ambush targeting security forces at Sunjwan in Jammu.  

Key names among the newly designated include Masood Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior Jaish-e-Mohammed functionary based out of Rawalkot (PoJK) who coordinates infiltration networks, and Mohammad Shaheed Faisal, whose tactical reach extends into global networks like Al-Qaeda and ISIS.  

What This Means: Tightening the Financial Noose

By explicitly categorizing these handlers as individual terrorists under Indian federal law, the government hands absolute leverage to agencies like the National Investigation Agency (NIA).  

This designation removes the bureaucratic hurdles required to freeze assets, seize properties linked to these individuals, block their digital and hawala funding channels, and impose an absolute embargo on any domestic or international entities attempting to facilitate financial transactions for them.  

It is a direct enforcement of India’s current security posture: a complete refusal to compromise with an ecosystem that uses terror as a state tool, ensuring that those who plot against India from Pakistani soil face total economic and legal strangulation.