New DelhiSeptember 15, 2025 10:42 AM IST
First published on: Sep 15, 2025 at 04:20 AM IST
As a step towards preventing “mass agitations by vested interests” in the future, Union Home Minister Amit Shah is learnt to have asked the Bureau of Police Research & Development (BPR&D) to prepare a standard operating procedure (SOP) after studying all post-Independence protests, especially those after 1974, to analyse the reasons, “financial aspects”, final outcomes and “behind-the-scene players” of those protests.
Shah is learnt to have issued these directions at the two-day ‘National Security Strategies Conference-2025’ organised by the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi in the last week of July.
“The BPR&D has been specifically asked to analyse reasons, patterns and outcomes of those protests, including behind-the-scene players,” a senior government official said. “It has been directed that an SOP should be formulated based on the outcome of the study to prevent mass agitations by vested interests in the future,” the official said.
Following Shah’s directions, the BPR&D, under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), is in the process of setting up a team which will coordinate with state police departments for old case files, including reports of their Crime Investigation Departments (CID).
According to an official, Shah has also asked the BPR&D to rope in financial investigation agencies like the Enforcement Directorate, Financial Intelligence Unit-India (FIU-IND) and the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to examine the “financial aspects” of such agitations.
Additionally, in order to dismantle terror funding networks, the ED, FIU-IND and CBDT have been asked to develop an SOP to identify unknown terror networks, their linkages and designs through analysis of financial irregularities.
Shah is also learnt to have asked the BPR&D to coordinate with the state police departments for a study on various religious congregations to understand the reasons behind incidents like stampedes, and prepare an SOP for monitoring and regulating such gatherings.
According to sources, Shah asked the National Investigation Agency (NIA), Border Security Force (BSF) and Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) to formulate separate methodologies to deal with Khalistani extremism and general criminal activities in Punjab.
“The intelligence agencies should constitute a team of officers with good background knowledge of Punjab-related issues for developing a framework of different approaches to deal with these issues,” the official said, adding that an out-of-the-box approach should be developed by the NIA for disrupting domestic nodes of the terror-criminal nexus, including shifting imprisoned criminals running their networks from jails to jails in other parts of the country.
