Two townships named “Mecca” and “Madina” have been developed close to terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)’s headquarters in Muridke, Lahore, the place plots are allotted solely to followers of Salafism, and the gates are guarded by armed cadres to implement “purity”, retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Anju Gupta has stated in her new guide.
Gupta, a 1990-batch Uttar Pradesh cadre IPS officer who retired as a DGP-rank officer within the UP Police, is thought to be a safety strategist along with her expertise spanning postings with the UN mission that held the administration of Kosovo, the United Nations Workplace on Medication and Crime in Delhi, and her time as an officer who served within the Union authorities’s Cupboard Secretariat.
The insights are a part of her new guide — “Glocal terror in South Asia: tracing the roots in geopolitics and the tragedy of Afghanistan” — the place Gupta traces 4 a long time of great-power rivalry, regional politics, and ideological shifts that fuelled the rise of what she calls “glocal” terrorism.
Printed by Simon & Schuster India, the guide predicts a number of potential black swan occasions within the area, citing the historic interaction of geopolitics, Pakistan’s inside energy dynamics, and the usage of terror proxies in South Asia.
A black swan occasion is an unpredictable however high-impact growth that would destabilise a area.
To put out her rivalry, Gupta covers how Pakistan — a rustic she describes as “the epicentre of instability in South Asia” — reached the place it’s now, together with the function of key terror figures in a chapter titled ‘Poster boys of glocal jihad in Af-Pak’.
LeT founder Hafiz Saeed, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Maulana Masood Azhar, 2008 Mumbai assault accused Sajid Mir and al-Qaeda chief Ilyas Kashmiri, she writes, acted as key human nodes plugging South Asia into al-Qaeda’s world community, whereas they themselves ran native insurgencies.
LeT, Gupta writes, has turn into the biggest Jihadi group in Pakistan.
“The group’s headquarters is in Muridke, about 30 kms from Lahore. Two townships, referred to as Mecca and Madina, have been developed there for the followers of the Salafi sect from everywhere in the nation with a view to present them with a pure ambiance strictly in accordance with the Shariah legislation.”
She provides: “Plots are allotted solely to the followers of Salafism and with a view to maintain them free from vices, the residents don’t have a proper to learn every day newspapers and to look at TV or images. With the intention to implement such ‘purity’, armed youth of LeT stay current on the gates of the 2 colonies. In Lahore itself, there are tons of of factors that function recruitment centres in addition to for assortment of donations for the group.”
India bombed the Muridke headquarters of LeT throughout Operation Sindoor on Could 7, 2025, in response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror assault.
The guide attracts an arc within the evolution of terrorism in Pakistan: from taking roots from the Afghan jihad within the late Chilly Conflict years, by way of regional conflicts wrought by teams equivalent to Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and different Salafi teams linked to al-Qaeda, to the becoming a member of of difficulty with Kashmir.
At one level, makes an attempt to duplicate the Afghan jihad mannequin in Kashmir was tried however failed and the insurgency then more and more relied on international fighters and militants educated by organisations working from Pakistan, Gupta contends.
Pakistan by no means succeeded in cultivating real political assist in Kashmir, relying as an alternative on cross-border terrorism as a method of disruption, she writes.
Now, a sequence of latest occasions — together with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Israel-Iran battle (the 12-day conflict in June 2025) — portend a “the realignment of relationships in South Asia and past” and “is prone to form occasions within the coming months and years”.
“On this context, it’s essential to place beneath the scanner developments happening on the epicentre of the instability in South Asia – Pakistan,” Gupta writes.
Certainly one of these is how Pakistan is clashing with neighbours on its both sides — Afghanistan to its east and India to its west. This makes the safety of each the jap and western entrance of Pakistan fragile and unstable”.
After which there may be the elevation of Asim Munir as the sector marshal of Pakistan, a transfer that provides him an entire free hand over safety and international coverage.
Gupta then ties the historical past with the current to argue {that a} “few potential Black Swan occasions” may play out in “coming months or years.”
She predicts one potential black swan occasion to be an inside revolt inside the Pakistani military. “In Pakistan, the safety and financial state of affairs is precarious and the 2 borders with India and Afghanistan are tense.”
Referring to the 26 suicide assaults in Pakistan in 2025 alone, the guide provides that “if the state of affairs worsens and the Chief of Defence Forces (Munir) is unable to deal with it, inside revolt within the military is a definite risk”.
Gupta then means that Munir may go to the extent of trying to take away the Taliban from energy, “even when it triggers a brand new part of extended civil conflict or anarchy in Afghanistan”.
