India Brings Back An Accused Trafficker And Calls It A National Milestone
India said on Saturday that it had secured the deportation from Türkiye of Navpreet Singh, who the government says had obtained Turkish citizenship under a false identity and continued to move heroin and methamphetamine into India from Afghanistan.
"Modi govt is committed to destroying every narco-cartel before Dec 2029," Shah wrote.
The framing is worth noticing as much as the arrest. A man accused of smuggling is described in the vocabulary of a security threat and his return is presented not as a police success but as a national one. Over the past several years India has steadily moved narcotics out of the category of crime and public health and into the category of security.
The machinery reflects it. The government points to the amendments made in 2019 to the National Investigation Agency Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which allowed enforcement to reach beyond banned organisations to individuals, handlers, funding networks and support structures abroad. It says that from 2020 the pursuit of fugitives was taken up in what it calls mission mode.
In January 2025 Shah launched BHARATPOL, a platform connecting the Central Bureau of Investigation, state police headquarters through Interpol liaison officers, and district police headquarters. The government says more than 1,400 state and central units are now on it, and that information the CBI seeks from other agencies, which once took far longer, is generally shared within ten to twenty days and sometimes within three to ten.
Alongside it, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act has been used to attach assets worth ₹17,874 crore belonging to fugitives between 2019 and 2026, according to the home ministry. It says 401 Red Corner Notices have been issued against fugitives over the past three years, and 182 up to July 2026. The ministry puts the total number of fugitives brought back at 288, from 36 countries, between 2019 and August 2026 — the same figure it cited five days earlier.
That earlier occasion was a conference in New Delhi on 28 September, where Shah inaugurated PRAHAAR, a counter-terrorism policy and strategy framework built on seven pillars, and launched an extradition portal intended to speed up the return of fugitives. At the same event he said agencies had broken more than 40 modules of the Shahzad Bhatti network, which he described as running weapons, explosives and narcotics across the border, with over 100 FIRs registered and 350 people arrested in 15 states. The network has been declared a terrorist organisation under the UAPA. The significant detail is the category: a smuggling network proscribed under anti-terror law.
The geography completed itself this week. On Saturday the external affairs ministry summoned Pakistan's Chargé d'Affaires to protest against what it called the continued facilitation of illegal cross-border infiltration, after an incident on 2 October in the Ferozepur sector of Punjab in which, by its account, three people crossed into Indian territory and were engaged by the Border Security Force. The ministry described this as part of a pattern of movement by armed narcotics syndicates operating from Pakistan, and urged Islamabad to investigate the complicity of its own border guarding forces. Pakistan's allegations about the incident were dismissed as baseless and motivated.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Punjab border, and a man living in Türkiye under another name. New Delhi is describing all of it as one problem.