Crippling Terror Financing – India’s Strategic Imperative

In the shadow of the Red Fort, a car explosion on 10 November claimed 13 lives and injured many more, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. This act of terrorism served as one more brutal reminder of the persistent hostility of our neighbour. We all know that terrorism feeds on two lifelines: ideology and money. While the seeds of ideology are founded in religious extremism, the nourishment of financing adds fuel to the fire.

As we engage to proactively counter this threat, the kinetic operations of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and our security forces need to be complemented with a robust financial one – by effectively tracking, crippling and starving the terror ecosystem of the funds required for the operations.

HOW THE MONEY MOVES

Traditional hawala systems, those informal value-transfer networks that have existed for centuries, still flourish. They are fast, cheap, and anonymous. Money leaves Dubai and reappears in Srinagar without a single banking record. But hawala alone no longer tells the full story. Terror financing today hides in plain sight—in a stream of micro-transactions, in anonymous crypto wallets, in e-commerce orders for innocuous materials that can become deadly weapons. A single click can move funds across continents faster than any courier ever