Communal terrorism

Story hook

It is 7 March 2022, Mangaluru, Karnataka. A pressure-cooker IED detonates inside a private bus on Nagori Road. Twenty passengers are injured; one — Mohammed Shariq, 24, an engineering dropout from Tirthahalli — is critically burned and identified later as the bomber himself. The device went off prematurely while he was moving it. Forensic recovery: ammonium nitrate, a 9V battery, a smartphone trigger, and a fake Aadhaar in the name "Premraj Hutagi". Karnataka police hand the case to the National Investigation Agency within 72 hours under the UAPA 1967.

NIA's investigation peels back a network nobody had previously mapped. Shariq was a sleeper of a lone-wolf cell inspired by ISIS Khorasan online propaganda. He had radicalised between 2018 and 2020 through encrypted Telegram channels, gone underground in 2020 after another Karnataka FIR for graffiti praising Zakir Naik, and trained in IED-making via YouTube + Dark Web manuals. No physical madrasa. No mosque. No bayat to a foreign emir. The chargesheet — filed at the NIA Special Court, Bengaluru in August 2022 — used UAPA Sections 16, 18, 20, 38, 39 plus IPC 307/120B plus Explosive Substances Act 1908.

This is the new face of Indian terrorism: home-grown, internet- radicalised, lone-actor / micro-cell, ideologically scattered. The era of LeT/JeM-style hierarchical infiltration has not disappeared, but it now coexists with self-radicalisers who read PDFs in Bengaluru bedrooms. The NIA — created after 26/11 Mumbai 2008 by the NIA Act 2008 — is India's federal counter-terror investigator and the institution most directly shaped by this new threat surface.

Why this matters for UPSC

Asked across Mains GS-III in **2018 (linkages of radicalisation

• social media), 2020 (challenges of inland security), 2022 (NIA's role), 2024 (countering radicalisation)**. Prelims has tested the NIA Act 2008, UAPA amendments 2019, and MAC/SMAC intelligence architecture. Interview boards probe how India should counter online radicalisation without curbing civil liberties — a topic where balance and nuance score.