Road to Punjab 2027 (Part 4): Law and Order, Border Security and the Drug Challenge — Can Punjab Turn the Tide?

 

There is a specific kind of courage required to live in a border district of Punjab. Not the abstract courage of political speeches or the heroic courage of soldiers, but the daily, quiet courage of a farmer in Tarn Taran who hears a drone overhead at night and does not know whether it carries cameras or contraband. The courage of a family in Amritsar whose son recovered from heroin addiction only to watch the supply routes for the same drug expand rather than contract. The courage of a shopkeeper in Gurdaspur who received an extortion call from a number with a foreign country code, making threats that are backed by people with guns and connections that span continents. Punjab's law and order challenge is not a governance abstraction. It is lived daily by ordinary citizens in some of the state's most strategically positioned and most economically vulnerable communities, and it is one of the most serious, complex, and politically consequential issues heading into the 2027 Assembly election. This article examines the full dimensions of that challenge: the verified data, the government's response, the critics' concerns, and the structural realities that no single government can resolve alone. It does so with the recognition that criminal networks are not Punjab's identity. They are Punjab's adversary. The state's people, its Sikh institutions, its farmers, its youth, and its cultural heritage stand apart from, and against, the criminal ecosystems that exploit Punjab's geography and its historical vulnerabilities.

Punjab's Security Landscape: Why Geography Creates Complexity

Punjab's security situation begins with geography. The state shares a 553-kilometre international border with Pakistan, one of the most sensitive and most contested land borders in South Asia. Unlike other international borders where distance provides a buffer, Punjab's agricultural heartland begins almost immediately at the border fence, meaning that the zone of vulnerability for drone drops, infiltration, and smuggling overlaps directly with farming communities whose economic and social character has nothing to do with the criminal networks that operate in their vicinity.

The Border Security Force guards the Punjab sector of the Indo-Pakistan border and has primary responsibility for preventing cross-border movement of persons, weapons, and narcotics. The BSF's 2025 annual performance data confirmed that its troops neutralised three Pakistani intruders and apprehended 18 Pakistani, 4 Nepali, and 3 Bangladeshi nationals while guarding the 553-kilometre-long Punjab border. The force also apprehended 251 Indian suspects including 133 smugglers with arms, ammunition, and narcotics. In 2025 alone, the BSF seized 272 drones and over 367 kg of heroin along the Punjab border.

Punjab Police operates as the second line of defence for internal security, working in coordination with the National Investigation Agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Intelligence Bureau, the Narcotics Control Bureau, and the Anti-Narcotics Task Force, among other central agencies. The coordination between state and central agencies on border security matters is an ongoing and complex operational reality rather than a settled institutional arrangement, and its effectiveness in specific situations has been a subject of political debate.

The Drug Challenge: Scale, Sophistication, and the Drone Revolution

The most significant documented development in Punjab's narcotics situation over the past five years is neither the volume of drugs seized nor the number of arrests made. It is the technological transformation of the smuggling infrastructure itself, and the scale of that transformation is captured in a single statistic from the Narcotics Control Bureau's 2025 annual report: drone-based drug smuggling cases along the India-Pakistan border jumped from just three incidents in 2021 to 305 incidents in 2025, a nearly hundredfold increase in four years. Punjab accounted for 298 of those 305 cases, with 461 kilograms of narcotics seized, primarily consisting of 449.751 kilograms of heroin and 9.018 kilograms of methamphetamine.

This escalation in scale correlates directly with a shift in operational sophistication. Smugglers along the India-Pakistan border have adopted new tactics to evade security agencies, including playing loud DJ music during drone drops to mask the sound of unmanned aerial vehicles and the landing of contraband consignments. Police Commissioner Gurpreet Singh Bhullar confirmed that investigations revealed smugglers on the Indian side increasingly use high-volume music to drown out the buzzing of drones and the thud of consignments hitting the ground, making detection difficult for security personnel and residents.

Earlier, smaller drones were preferred for limited quantities of heroin, pistols, or ammunition because their low buzzing sound made them harder to detect. But recent seizures suggest smugglers were increasingly relying on bigger drones capable of transporting multiple weapons, larger narcotics consignments, and even cash. The larger drones have a payload capacity of 10 to 15 kilograms and a lower detection risk. The BSF and police are analysing seized drones, communication devices, and digital evidence to identify handlers across the border and their local associates. Recovered drones have revealed cameras, GPS systems, and pre-fed route maps, highlighting the technological sophistication of smuggling networks.

In June 2026 alone, the scale of active seizures illustrated the ongoing nature of the challenge in the most concrete terms possible. On June 11, Amritsar city police seized over 30 kg of heroin. On June 19, Punjab Police seized 26 sophisticated weapons including an AK-47 rifle. Two days later, the BSF and the Anti-Narcotics Task Force jointly seized 27 kg of heroin, one of the biggest seizures in recent months.

The NCB's 2025 report accounts for heroin as the dominant narcotic being smuggled, but it also documents a secondary wave that is equally concerning for public health. Punjab recorded the highest seizure of codeine-based cough syrup in India, with over 895,000 bottles confiscated. Authorities noted that lax oversight allows addictive prescription drugs like buprenorphine, tramadol, and alprazolam to be illicitly diverted from pharmacies for misuse. The broader national trend of pharmaceutical misuse has increased by 77 percent between 2021 and 2025, and Punjab sits at its most acute expression. Punjab has emerged as the focal point of India's narcotics crisis, accounting for 58 percent of the nation's total heroin seizures and 97 percent of drone-based smuggling cases along the India-Pakistan border, according to the NCB 2025 annual report data released by Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

The trajectory from 3 cases involving 10 kilograms of narcotics in 2021 to 35 cases involving 148 kilograms in 2022, 28 cases involving 103 kilograms in 2023, 179 cases involving 236 kilograms in 2024, and 305 cases involving 468 kilograms in 2025 is not a story of worsening governance alone. It is a story of worsening adversary capability: the criminal networks behind this escalation are investing in technology, refining their logistics, and adapting to enforcement countermeasures with a speed and sophistication that challenge traditional policing responses.

Organised Crime: The Transnational Dimension

Punjab's organised crime problem has a structural characteristic that makes it uniquely difficult to address through conventional law enforcement. A significant portion of the gangsters who direct extortion, contract killings, arms trafficking, and drug distribution networks in Punjab do so from abroad, operating from safe havens in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates, beyond the immediate reach of Punjab Police and even of Indian extradition mechanisms.

Operation Prahar, launched on January 20, 2026, was the most significant organised crime crackdown in Punjab's recent history. The 72-hour statewide special operation, led by Director General of Police Gaurav Yadav with over 12,000 police personnel organised into nearly 2,000 teams, targeted 60 major gangsters and approximately 1,200 associates identified as key nodes in Punjab's organised criminal ecosystem. By May 2026, through Operation Prahar combined with the ongoing Gangstran Te Vaar campaign, Punjab Police had conducted 77,895 raids and arrested 30,721 gangsters. The district police in Tarn Taran alone registered 490 cases under the NDPS Act, arrested 630 individuals, and recovered 47.527 kg of heroin in three months. A total of Rs 65 crore in gangster assets was frozen under the Gangstran Te Vaar operation.

The structural innovation of Operation Prahar was its ecosystem-based approach. Rather than targeting individual criminals in isolation, the operation sought to map and disrupt financing networks, weapon supply routes, communication systems, and safe house infrastructure simultaneously. A newly formed Overseas Fugitive Tracking and Extradition Cell, led by IG Counter-Intelligence Ashish Chaudhary, was established to pursue gangsters abroad and coordinate extradition cases with central agencies and Interpol. An anti-gangster helpline, 93946-93946, was launched to encourage citizen participation while ensuring confidentiality, along with a Rs 10 crore reward policy for actionable intelligence.

The Tribune's detailed reporting on the 61 overseas gangsters targeted under Operation Prahar illuminates the transnational complexity of the problem. The list includes individuals suspected to be hiding in the USA, Germany, and Canada, involved in extortion, drug trafficking, and even grenade attacks on Punjab Police. One individual is identified as working on behalf of Pakistan's ISI, involved in cross-border smuggling of weapons and drugs through drones while simultaneously promoting violence under extremist banners on social media. This overlap between criminal networks and Pakistan-linked militant financing is a dimension of Punjab's security challenge that requires Central Government intelligence coordination and diplomatic engagement alongside state-level policing.

The targeted killing trend documented in Part 2 of this series bears repeating in this context. Punjab recorded 31 fatalities in 2025 from targeted killings and gang-related violence, the highest annual count since 2016. Early 2026 saw at least six such incidents in the first eight days of January alone. On May 1, 2026, a close associate of gangster Sukha Kahlon was shot dead inside a car, illustrating the ongoing operational capacity of gangs even during active Operation Prahar enforcement. The cybercrime dimension has separately emerged as a major law enforcement challenge, with Punjab Police's cybercrime division smashing a Rs 540 crore syndicate by freezing over 63,000 accounts amid 62,000 cybercrime probes, according to reporting from June 2026.

The government's response to the anti-drone challenge has included both state and Central Government action. Ten anti-drone systems were installed on the border in one phase, followed by 23 more deployed by the Centre. Anti-drone systems and round-the-clock patrolling have been deployed to monitor suspicious activity in border-belt villages. These are genuine operational investments that represent an improvement over the baseline that existed five years ago, even as the drone smuggling statistics demonstrate that the adversary is simultaneously investing in countermeasures.

Government's Anti-Drug Campaign: The Yudh Nashian Virudh Record

The Bhagwant Mann government's primary anti-drug vehicle has been the Yudh Nashian Virudh campaign, launched on March 1, 2025. As documented in Part 2 of this series, the campaign produced 65,824 arrests, 2,021 kilograms of heroin seized, and 30,104 drug-related cases registered in its first 455 days through May 30, 2026. The conviction rate in drug cases rose to approximately 87 to 88 percent, described as the highest recorded in the state.

The financial investigation dimension of the anti-drug effort has also expanded. The NCB nationally has shifted focus from seizure-based action toward financial investigations targeting drug cartels, with cartel assets worth Rs 836 crore frozen in 2025, up sharply from Rs 164.93 crore five years earlier. Punjab Police's own asset freezing operations against gangsters, including the Rs 65 crore frozen under Gangstran Te Vaar, reflect the same financial disruption strategy at the state level.

These enforcement outputs are real and substantial. They are also, taken in isolation, insufficient to characterise the full picture. The NCB's 2025 data showing Punjab accounts for 58 percent of India's heroin seizures reflects the simultaneous reality that the state remains the primary entry point for heroin into India. High seizure volumes can mean either better enforcement or more narcotics being pushed across the border, or both simultaneously, and disentangling these two explanations requires trend analysis that takes several years to become conclusive.

The 2026-27 Punjab budget allocated Rs 150 crore for the drug and socio-economic census launched by the government, intended to generate comprehensive baseline data on the dimensions and geographic distribution of drug abuse as a foundation for more targeted rehabilitation investment. The census has attracted controversy around its inclusion of governance-satisfaction questions, as documented in Part 2, but its public health data gathering objective, if executed properly, could provide information that genuinely improves policy targeting.

Rehabilitation and Prevention: The Long Game

One of the most consistent findings in international drug policy research is that enforcement alone cannot resolve a narcotics crisis whose roots include poverty, unemployment, social dislocation, and the economic rationale that trafficking provides for communities with limited alternative income. Punjab's challenge illustrates this finding. The 23,940 individuals admitted to de-addiction centres and 59,840 referred to Outpatient Opioid Assisted Treatment clinics under the Yudh Nashian Virudh campaign represent a genuine investment in treatment. However, independent health experts working in Punjab have documented significant variation in the quality and consistency of de-addiction services across the state, with urban centres generally better served than rural and border-belt communities where need is most acute.

Youth engagement programmes that combine skill development with counselling and community support are an important complement to both enforcement and medical treatment. The government's Startup Punjab initiative, its skill development camps, and its recruitment drives all address, indirectly, the economic vulnerability that makes young people susceptible to recruitment into drug distribution networks. However, the employment gap between what these programmes deliver and what Punjab's labour market demands of its young population remains significant, as documented in Part 3 of this series.

Prison-linked criminal operations represent a specific rehabilitation and governance challenge. Several extortion campaigns and gang communications have been documented as originating from within Punjab's prisons, using mobile phones smuggled into correctional facilities. Addressing this requires upgraded prison security technology alongside the broader institutional reforms necessary to reduce the influence of criminal networks within correctional settings.

Community participation in intelligence generation is now explicitly built into Punjab Police's operational strategy through the anti-gangster helpline and reward policy. The Tribune noted that such measures will succeed only if anonymity is genuinely protected, a prerequisite for breaking the cycle of fear and silence that allows criminal networks to thrive in communities where reporting a gangster to authorities carries real personal risk.

What Supporters and Critics Say

Supporters of the government's law and order approach point to Operation Prahar's scale and ambition as evidence of genuine institutional commitment. The creation of the Overseas Fugitive Tracking and Extradition Cell, the anti-drone deployment, the 87 to 88 percent drug conviction rate, and the 77,895 raids conducted by May 2026 all reflect a government that has invested significantly in expanding its operational capacity. They argue that the transnational character of the challenge, gangsters directing operations from the USA and Canada, drones being flown from Pakistani territory under ISI direction, means that no state government can solve it unilaterally, and that Punjab is doing what it can within its jurisdictional and resource constraints.

Critics, including opposition parties, independent security analysts, and The Tribune's editorial board, raise concerns that are grounded in observable evidence. The 31 targeted killings in 2025, the highest in nearly a decade, occurred alongside the enforcement campaigns rather than declining because of them. The drug supply has not been interrupted at a structural level, as the continuing large seizures in June 2026 confirm. The rehabilitation infrastructure, while expanded, remains insufficient for the scale of the treatment need. And the prison communication problem reflects a governance gap in correctional institutions that has not been closed despite being documented for several years.

The Tribune's assessment, published as an editorial during Operation Prahar, captured the balanced view most succinctly: it described the operation as a good start rather than an endgame, and noted that Punjab's war against gangsters is a long haul that the state cannot fight alone. This is neither praise nor condemnation. It is an honest assessment of the institutional reality.

What Punjab Should Focus On Before 2027

Several policy priorities emerge from the evidence as most likely to produce measurable improvement in the security situation within the remaining time before the 2027 election.

Expanding and standardising anti-drone surveillance technology along the full 553 kilometres of the border, rather than concentrating it in specific zones that leave gaps exploitable by technologically sophisticated smuggling networks, is the most immediate technical requirement. The Central Government's deployment of 23 additional anti-drone systems is a step in this direction that needs to be built upon rather than treated as sufficient.

Strengthening the Overseas Fugitive Tracking and Extradition Cell with adequate personnel, legal resources, and diplomatic support to actually extradite key gangsters from their foreign safe havens is the institutional investment that could most directly disrupt the command-and-control architecture of Punjab's organised crime networks. This requires Central Government engagement with multiple foreign governments simultaneously.

Judicial efficiency in drug and organised crime cases is a structural bottleneck that no police operation can compensate for. The conviction rate improvement is significant, but cases pending trial in NCB Jammu Zonal Unit, and the broader challenge of timely prosecution of arrested gangster associates who are often released on bail before trial completion, require investment in both prosecution capacity and judicial infrastructure.

Deepening the rehabilitation infrastructure, particularly in rural and border-belt communities with limited access to quality de-addiction services, is both a public health imperative and a security investment, since communities with better treatment access are less likely to produce the local criminal workforce that transnational gangsters recruit.

Employment creation for youth in border districts, where the economic vulnerability that makes smuggling and gang work attractive is most acute, is the single most powerful long-term anti-drug and anti-crime investment available to any government. The economic policy choices documented in Part 3 of this series and the employment creation record documented in Part 2 both connect directly to the security challenge examined in this article.

Conclusion: The Fight Is Against Crime, Not Community

Punjab's law and order challenge in 2026 is real, documented, and serious. It is also important to state clearly that it is the challenge of a state battling adversaries who exploit Punjab's geography and its young people's economic vulnerabilities, not the challenge of a state whose people or culture or religion are defined by the criminal networks that operate within its borders. The Sikh values of seva, justice, and community solidarity that animate Punjab's cultural identity are as far from the gangster-extortion model as it is possible to be. The farmers, the students, the healthcare workers, the entrepreneurs, the teachers who constitute the vast majority of Punjab's 30 million people are not the drug problem. They are, in many cases, its victims.

The path forward requires combining effective policing with rehabilitation, employment creation, community participation, and the kind of sustained Central-State coordination that a challenge with transnational roots genuinely demands. Operation Prahar and Yudh Nashian Virudh have generated large numbers and demonstrated operational capacity. Whether they have generated the structural disruption that makes drone deliveries harder, gangster networks weaker, and young people more economically secure than when they started, that is the question whose answer will take more than a single operation or a single election cycle to write. Punjab's voters in 2027 will render their own judgment on where that answer stands.

Editor's Note: This is Part 4 of Bharat and Beyond's Road to Punjab 2027 series. In our next article, we will examine Punjab's youth, employment, education, and migration trends, and how they could shape the state's political and economic future ahead of the 2027 Assembly election.