NEW DELHI: As heavy rains flooded Delhi recently, police worked on rescues. But detectives were chasing something else entirely. A week ago, Delhi Police's Special Cell arrested Nepali citizen Prabhat Chaurasia from the crowded Laxmi Nagar area in east Delhi, a lower-middle-class neighborhood of narrow, dark alleys lined with shops and homes.
Chaurasia had bought 16 SIM cards from different providers using his Aadhaar card. These were sent to Nepal and later tracked to Pakistan's Bahawalpur by the Electronics Surveillance Team.
This isn't new. Intelligence agencies IB and R&AW have previously planted SIM cards in enemy territory to track terrorists. It's unclear who Chaurasia was working for, but the trail led from the Himalayas to Pakistan. Former R&AW Special Secretary D.P. Sinha wrote about similar operations in his fiction "Trojan Horse." He described how SIM cards were used to track Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists, with intelligence operatives posing as mujahideen, often operating through Nepal.
Rewind to June 29, 1998: Close to the Pashupatinath Temple in Siphal in Kathmandu’s Bagmati zone at 9.30 PM Mirza Dilshad Beg stepped out of his car when two assailants fired indiscriminately at him, and he fell. His driver was also shot and died on the spot. A Member of Parliament in Nepal, Mirza Dilshad Beg, was assassinated when he was on his way to meet his second wife.
Twenty years later, in Sunsari district of Nepal, close to the Indian border, a man named Khursheed Alam Ansari was killed. A principal of Ryan National School, Ansari was well-respected in the area, and he doubled up as a cleric at the local mosque in Harinagara town. As per the Nepal police, two men on a motorbike came and targeted a '50-year-old school principal' who lay in a pool of blood with injuries on the head, abdomen, and leg.
The Nepal government took the murder seriously, and it sent the body for an autopsy. Nepal's Central Investigation Bureau led the investigation and Nepal’s then home ministry set up a five-member probe committee to investigate the murder.
The two killings rattled Nepal, and in both, it pointed fingers towards the Indian agencies, accusing them of operating from Nepal's soil.
Both incidents stem from events in early 1990s India. After BJP-allied groups demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, severe communal riots erupted across India, with Mumbai experiencing the worst violence. This led to the devastating 1993 Mumbai blasts that killed 257 people and wounded hundreds more. The coordinated explosions, from Zaveri Bazaar to Worli to the Bombay Stock Exchange, fundamentally changed India's security apparatus.
Investigations traced the attacks to crime boss Dawood Ibrahim and his associates, who operated from Dubai and Karachi, smuggling RDX explosives into India for the bombings.
Intelligence agencies discovered that Dawood Ibrahim, working with Pakistan's ISI, had established operations in Nepal through Mirza Dilshad Beg, an Indian-born businessman who had acquired Nepalese citizenship. Beg ran a criminal empire involving counterfeit Indian currency, fake passports, narcotics, and arms smuggling. He maintained legitimacy as a businessman and later as an MP from Nepal's Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), which had royal backing.
Despite recognising Beg as a major threat, India's Intelligence Bureau, R&AW, and SSB were powerless to act because of his protected status in Nepal. Beg's influence extended to funding ministers and the king's cabinet in the Hindu Kingdom. He served as ISI's primary operational coordinator, facilitating the transport of operatives, including Abu Salem and Kashmir insurgents, through Nepal to training camps in Afghanistan run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
According to Rajeev Bhattacharya's book "ULFA: The Mirage of Dawn," these camps also trained militants from Northeast India, particularly Assam's ULFA. This arrangement allowed ISI directors like Asad Durrani and later Lt. Gen. Javed Nasir to maintain plausible deniability while Beg executed operations and kept Indian intelligence agencies on edge.
India and Nepal share a 1,664-kilometer border, with 821 kilometers running along Uttar Pradesh alone. The UP districts of Maharajganj, Shravasti, Siddharthnagar, Balrampur, and Bahraich contain 262 border villages, approximately 70 of which are Muslim-majority areas with strong family ties extending into Bihar and UP.
Nepal remains highly sensitive—a yam-shaped nation squeezed between India and China. The geography becomes even more complex at the narrow Siliguri corridor, where just 22 kilometers separate Nepal from Bangladesh. Here, Nepal's Panitanki border and Bangladesh's Fulbari border sit only 44 kilometers apart along India's vulnerable "chicken's neck."
This strategic chokepoint puts China within miles of the corridor, with Bhutan tucked in the corner. Pakistan also has interests in this region, seeking to exploit the geographic vulnerabilities and create new challenges for India's security.
According to 'Fulcrum Of Evil: ISI-CIA-Al Qaeda Nexus' by Maloy K Dhar, mosque construction in this border region surged dramatically after the 1980s. Nepal Police documented 120 mosques built between 1985-2000, funded primarily by Saudi Arabia. This number jumped to 270 mosques and madrasas by the early 2000s.
Some officials in the IB also indicated these facilities were being used to shelter members of terrorist organizations including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Al-Badr, and Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). These groups increasingly used Nepal as an alternative route to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as traditional Kashmir routes came under intense Indian security scrutiny.
The infrastructure continued to expand, with locals reporting nearly 1,000 such religious structures today. Nepal's Muslim population grew from 4.2% in 2000 to 5.9% in the 2021 census. This growth is concentrated primarily along the Indian border in Nepal's Terai region, driven by cross-border family connections and the migration of Indian Muslims, who feel insecure and seek refuge in Nepal's border areas.
Sheikh Anwar, a local who works as a tailor in Kathmandu said, “everyone here is not a spy or agent. The government of India should stop seeing us with suspicion.”
"The borders are porous, encouraging smuggling and other nefarious activities but gangs are associated with it, not Muslims. Yes, many are involved in smuggling and other nefarious activities for money and the porous border but for that it has been the gangs and not only Muslims involved in such activities," Anwar says, as he stitches T-Shirts printed with the two Shambhu eyes and a slogan ‘I Love Nepal’.
Not many people here speak openly, but some admit that the community has been exploited with cash and other benefits. Both ISI and R&AW have links within the communities, some point out and suspect that some within the community could be working for both.
M K Rasgotra who was the second secretary in Indian Embassy in Kathmandu (later ambassador to Nepal and foreign secretary) way back in 1954, notes in his book “'A Life in Diplomacy’, that he visited Birgunj and was startled to discover 'Little Pakistan’". Post partition many of those having ideological affinity to Pakistan but couldn't make it to Pakistan, settled across the Indian border in Nepal while maintaining allegiance towards the newly formed Pakistan, he wrote.
They enjoyed the support of Nepal’s kings - from Tribhuvan to his son Mahendra and later Birendra. Reciprocally, this fringe population of 'Little Pakistan' supported RPP. The assassinated Mirza Dilshad Beg was one among them who climbed up the political ladder.
Sometime around April 10, 2013, a family of twelve which included four men, three women and five children were apprehended by the SSB at the India-Nepal border in Bihar's Madhumabi sector. The four men were from Kashmir's Kupwara and Baramulla.
After IB interrogated them, it was found that more than a decade ago, these men were 'kidnapped' from Kashmir and taken away by the militants to Pakistan's Peshawar to work as labourers. Over time, they married, had children and suddenly planned to return to Kashmir.
One IB officer, however, took this story with a grain of salt and found it to be bogus but the details were not shared with the media, a source in the Ministry of Home Affairs said. The family found its way back to Kashmir and operated as Over Ground Workers of militant outfits, he said. News reports in 2013 stated that the families had been handed over to the J&K Police. The families could not be traced. Only, different versions persist in the intelligence circles.
Same year, Syed Abdul Karim Tunda, the first LeT cadre from India behind multiple blasts was tracked in Nepal. From 1993 Bombay to 26/11 Mumbai attacks, Tunda's name surfaced as part of the logistical and mastermind ring. R&AW kept a close vigil. His fingers were blown off years ago in 1985 while making a bomb and even as he turned old and frail, his fingerless hand was deemed as evidence against him.
His activities alerted the R&AW and he was finally apprehended in Uttarakhand and dragged back to India by a special operation that has been undisclosed for numerous reasons.
Muhammed Arshad Cheema, a political counselor at the Pakistan embassy in Kathmandu, is a name that crops up often in intelligence circles. From 1996 onwards along with Colonel Farooq, Cheema was believed to be involved in supplying arms and RDX to Khalistan groups like KCF (Khalistan Commando force) for blasts in mainland India.
Two alleged Khalistani operatives, Joga Singh and Kuwar Pal Singh were arrested in the late 1990s and brought to India. They were said to have close links with Malik Riaz, a close aide of Dawood Ibrahim, and Cheema, a high-ranking intelligence official said. However, Cheema was not arrested and there is no explanation for that.
R&AW Secretary A S Dulat was shocked when the news of hijacking of flight AI 814 while taking off from Tribhuvan International Airport came in December 1999. The release of the plane and its 184 passengers was negotiated in Kandahar by Anand Arni, Ajit Doval and C D Sahay in exchange of three terrorists Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar.
Intelligence officers blamed Arshad Cheema.
Again in 2008, Delhi was rocked by multiple blasts. Leads took Delhi police to Jamia Nagar's Batla House, where after a gunfight Indian Mujahideen cadres were neutralized and one officer, Moolchand Sharma was killed. Leads took IB and R&AW again to Nepal where Yasin Batkal was arrested, in 2013, on the border of India-Nepal. Batkal was said to be sheltered by Khursheed Ansari, later killed in 2018.
Meanwhile, a Pakistani retired colonel disappeared from Lumbini in southern Nepal, with suspicion falling on Indian agencies. Colonel Md Habib Zahir was lured by a UK national named Mark Thompson for a supposed job. Zahir traveled from Oman to Kathmandu, then vanished in Lumbini.
According to Indian intelligence officials’ theories, Zahir joined Pakistan's ISI after early retirement from the army. When criminal Uzair Baloch was arrested in Karachi, he revealed names his Lyari-based gang was supporting. Pakistani media claimed Kulbhusan Yadav (alias Hussain Mubarak Patel) was operating as a R&AW agent.
Zahir was reportedly tasked with tracking and capturing Yadav from Sistan-Balochistan province. The rest is well-known history, except that Zahir disappeared and remains missing. Stories suggest R&AW and India's border force SSB took revenge. If true, this would be a rare win for Indian intelligence agencies.
According to Yatish Yadav's book "RAW: A History of India's Covert Operations," India's intelligence agency R&AW supported Nepali Maoists against the monarchy. Former R&AW chief Ravi Sinha operated inside Nepal to build this movement while stationed in Lucknow.
The book reveals how India's own intelligence agencies sometimes worked against each other. In 2003, while R&AW backed the Maoists, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) helped Nepal's intelligence service arrest R&AW asset Chandra Prakash Gajurel in West Bengal. The IB handed him over to Nepal Police, showing the lack of coordination between India's intelligence agencies as they competed on the same issues.
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