New Delhi: The Ministry of Home Affairs has formally released India’s National Counter-Terrorism Policy and Strategy, titled PRAHAAR, giving the country its first consolidated doctrine that brings intelligence, policing, law, diplomacy, and social interventions under a single national framework.
The document institutionalises India’s long-stated position of zero tolerance towards terrorism and translates it into a seven-pillar strategy intended to synchronise responses across central agencies and state governments. Rather than announcing new powers, PRAHAAR codifies existing practices and aligns them with emerging threats, particularly those driven by technology and transnational networks.
Structurally, the doctrine arranges India’s counter-terror response into seven functional pillars.
Prevention is intelligence-dominant, with the Multi-Agency Centre and the Intelligence Bureau positioned at the core of collection, fusion, and dissemination of threat inputs.
Response is police-led, with the National Security Guard serving as the national backstop for major attacks.
Capacity aggregation emphasizes modernization, training standardization, and inter-agency uniformity across the Union and the States.
The rule of law is foregrounded to defend the legitimacy of coercive state power and ensure due process.
Radicalization is framed as a graded continuum, addressed through surveillance, policing, community engagement, and welfare-linked interventions.
International cooperation is positioned as essential to addressing the transnational character of terrorism.
Recovery is framed as societal resilience rather than mere reconstruction of damaged infrastructure.
A key shift lies in the explicit recognition of non-traditional threat vectors.
The policy identifies risks linked to CBRNED materials, defined in the document as Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosive, and Digital threats, alongside the misuse of drones and robotics, encrypted communication platforms, the dark web, and crypto-based financing. This reflects a move away from a primarily infiltration-centric threat model to one that treats terrorism as a technologically enabled, networked enterprise.
Another significant change is the emphasis on legal hardening of terror investigations. PRAHAAR calls for legal experts to be associated with cases from the stage of FIR registration through prosecution. The objective is to reduce procedural lapses and technical acquittals that have weakened deterrence in high-profile terror cases in the past.
At the federal level, the strategy pushes for structural uniformity. It proposes a standardised anti-terror architecture across states and Union Territories, including comparable training, resources, and investigative methodologies for state Anti-Terror Squads. The aim is to reduce disparities in capability and response time between regions facing similar threat profiles.
The policy also expands the definition of counter-terrorism beyond enforcement. It adopts a whole-of-society approach to recovery and resilience, explicitly involving doctors, psychologists, lawyers, civil society organisations, and community and religious leaders in post-attack rehabilitation, trauma management, and reintegration of affected communities.
Operationally, PRAHAAR reinforces intelligence-led prevention. The Multi-Agency Centre and the Joint Task Force on Intelligence are positioned as the core platforms for real-time intelligence sharing and coordinated action across jurisdictions. On the ground, this is expected to translate into greater focus on dismantling crime-terror nexuses, cutting off logistics and funding channels rather than only neutralising individual modules.
The document also introduces a graded response framework for radicalisation. Instead of default incarceration, identified individuals, particularly youth, may be subjected to calibrated interventions ranging from monitoring and counselling to de-radicalization programmes and legal action, depending on the assessed level of radicalisation.
Border security and protection of critical infrastructure remain central pillars, with renewed emphasis on advanced surveillance tools and the safeguarding of sectors such as power, transport, space, defence, and atomic energy.
