THE MINISTRY OF HOME AFFAIRS informed the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday that it had so far banned 54 terrorists and 44 terrorist organisations under the UAPA’s Fourth and First Schedules.
Nityanand Rai, Minister of State for Home Affairs, stated that four organisations were notified as terrorist organisations under the UAPA this year, and their names have been put to the Act’s First Schedule. “These four organisations have been involved in terrorism and have committed and participated in different acts of terrorism in India,” he said.
In terms of the four organisations, Rai stated that the TRF is a proxy outfit of the terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba which was founded in 2019. “It has been involved in the planning of killings of security personnel and innocent civilians in Jammu and Kashmir, co-ordinating and transporting weapons to support proscribed terrorist organisations, recruiting terrorists, infiltrating terrorists, and smuggling weapons and narcotics across the border,” he said.
He described the PAFF as a proxy group of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed that was formed in 2019. “It has been involved in radicalization of youth…, issuing threats to Indian security forces, political leaders, and civilians working in J&K from other parts of the country, and actively conspiring physically and through social media to carry out violent terrorist acts in J&K and major cities in India,” he said.
According to him, the third banned organisation, JKGF, emerged in 2020 and drew its cadres from proscribed terrorist organisations such as Lashker-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Tehreek-ul-Mujahideen, and Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami. “It has been involved in infiltration bids, narcotics and weapon smuggling, and terror acts in the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir,” Rai wrote in response to a written question from BJP MP Sushil Kumar Modi.
The KTF was founded in 2011 as an offshoot of Babbar Khalsa International, a UAPA-designated terrorist organisation. “It encourages terrorist activities, and its cadres have received financial and logistical support… from their foreign-based handlers, and they have been discovered involved in different terrorist instances, including targeted executions,” he said.
