India Bans Shahzad Bhatti Network: 3 Years After Khalistan Tiger Force, MHA Marks Punjab's 46th Terror Designation
Shahzad Bhatti Network banned under UAPA as India’s 46th terror outfit — three years after Khalistan Tiger Force, MHA’s crackdown on Punjab’s cross-border terror-gangster pipeline continues.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, September 16
The Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday declared the Shahzad Bhatti Network (SBN) a terrorist organisation under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, adding the Pakistan-based, ISI-backed outfit as the 46th entry in the First Schedule of the Act — and marking the latest step in a specific, Punjab-directed line of bans that MHA has been building since it outlawed the Khalistan Tiger Force more than three years ago.
Home Minister Amit Shah announced the designation on X, framing it within the government’s stated “zero tolerance” approach to terrorism.
According to the government’s own characterisation, the Shahzad Bhatti network’s objective was to draw in impressionable youth and local criminals to move arms, explosives and narcotics across the border, and through that activity, threaten the country’s democratic structure and communal harmony.
The gazette notification invokes Section 35(1)(a) of the UAPA and cites cases registered against SBN cadres under the UAPA itself, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Arms Act, the Explosive Substances Act, the Explosives Act, the Information Technology Act, the Delhi Prevention of Defacement of Property Act, the Official Secrets Act, and the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 — a spread of statutes that reflects how the network’s alleged activity, arms running, digital radicalisation, explosives, and cross-border logistics, cut across several existing legal categories rather than fitting neatly into one.
Who is Shahzad Bhatti
Shahzad Bhatti, a Lahore resident believed to be operating out of Dubai, has been on Indian investigators’ radar for well over a year. North Desk first profiled him in June, when the National Investigation Agency conducted coordinated searches across 18 locations in nine districts of Punjab and Haryana, targeting what the agency described as his on-ground support structure — local operatives, financial conduits and communication channels.
At that point, NIA had already linked Shahzad Bhatti to three separate attacks within a span of ten months: the March 2025 grenade attack on the residence of Jalandhar-based YouTuber Navdeep Sandhu, who runs a channel as “Rozer Sandhu”; the November 2025 blast at the Women’s Police Station in Sirsa, Haryana, in which NIA chargesheeted nine individuals including Shahzad Bhatti and a second Pakistan-based handler, Sohail Ahmad alias Sohail Baloch; and the January 2026 car bomb at Baldev Nagar police station in Ambala, where an arrested accused was found to have been in direct contact with Shahzad Bhatti.
Investigators have named associates including Zeeshan Akhtar and US-based Happy Passia in connection with his network.
Security agencies describe Shahzad Bhatti as a rival of jailed category-A gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, running a competing cross-border pipeline for weapons and explosives into Punjab. Intelligence assessments have separately tied his network to the hand grenade used in the Gurdaspur police station blast, after Delhi Police arrested three men linked to a Shahzad Bhatti-run module in that case.
The scale of the crackdown against his network expanded sharply this year. Ahead of Independence Day, agencies carried out a multi-state operation that, according to government figures, led to more than 200 arrests across 14 states in connection with over 80 FIRs, with recoveries including IEDs, hand grenades bearing Pakistan Ordnance Factory markings, pistols, live cartridges and covert CCTV equipment allegedly used for surveillance. Cases were registered under the UAPA, BNS, Arms Act, NDPS Act and the Explosive Substances Act.
Extradition remains the unresolved piece of this story. India and Pakistan have no functional extradition treaty, and Shahzad Bhatti — like several Pakistan-based handlers before him — remains outside the reach of Indian courts even as the domestic case against his network is built chargesheet by chargesheet.
The three-year line from Khalistan Tiger Force
SBN’s designation today is worth reading against the specific sequence of Punjab-linked terror bans that preceded it.
The Khalistan Tiger Force, an offshoot of Babbar Khalsa International formed in 2011, was declared a terrorist organisation in February 2023 — the government at the time described KTF cadres as receiving financial and logistics support, including sophisticated weaponry, from foreign-based handlers, and linked the outfit to targeted killings. Then-NIA chief Hardeep Singh Nijjar, killed in Canada in June 2023, was identified by Indian agencies as KTF’s operational head — a designation that fed directly into the India-Canada diplomatic rupture that followed.
Where KTF represented an older model of Khalistan-linked armed secessionism, run by a cadre with roots in the 1990s insurgency, SBN represents a newer template that MHA’s own notification language makes explicit: a hybrid structure combining ISI backing, cross-border smuggling economics, and the deliberate recruitment of ordinary criminals and impressionable youth rather than committed ideological cadre.
The through-line MHA is drawing is less about ideology and more about interdicting the pipelines — arms, explosives, narcotics, money — that keep Punjab’s terror-gangster nexus supplied, regardless of which banner a given handler operates under.
Between KTF and SBN, the First Schedule grew to include the Popular Front of India and its associated fronts (2022, entry 43), and a series of Jammu and Kashmir-focused outfits and unlawful associations added through 2023 and 2025.
SBN’s addition at serial number 46 makes it the first entry in this list explicitly built around the arms-narcotics-smuggling model rather than a standing ideological or separatist organisation — a distinction that itself signals how MHA now frames the threat coming out of Pakistan into Punjab.
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