Photo: Ericwinny / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Eighteen people have been arrested after central agencies and the police of Assam, Mizoram and Manipur carried out coordinated raids at 38 locations on October 23 against what the government describes as an international drug cartel, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Sunday. Announcing the crackdown, code-named Operation Trident, on X, Shah said it had uncovered hawala transactions worth about ₹100 crore.
What the raids turned up
According to the home minister, the operation was aimed at a trafficking network working across the borders India shares with Myanmar and Bangladesh. Besides the arrests, he listed the following results:
- 1,424 bank accounts frozen
- Properties worth ₹17.82 crore attached
- 500 detonators seized
- ₹12 lakh in cash recovered
- Hawala transactions of around ₹100 crore traced
The government has not yet named the people arrested, the specific locations that were searched or the type and quantity of drugs involved. Shah congratulated the anti-narcotics team, crediting both the central agencies and the police forces of the three states.
India will hammer until the last nail is driven into the coffin of drug cartels.
Amit Shah, Union Home Minister
The ‘death triangle’ route
Shah said the cartel moved narcotics through what he called the “Death Triangle Corridor”. He had used similar language on October 13 at a meeting of home ministers from BIMSTEC countries, where he said there was nothing golden about the Golden Triangle, the drug-producing region where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, and that India preferred to call it the death triangle.
The Northeast sits on the main route by which methamphetamine from that region enters India. The Narcotics Control Bureau’s 2025 annual report found that Mizoram alone accounted for nearly 42% of the country’s seizures of amphetamine-type stimulants, ahead of Manipur and Delhi. The bureau has also noted that Myanmar has overtaken Afghanistan as the world’s largest producer of illicit opium after the Taliban banned poppy cultivation, with output there at a ten-year high amid civil war and economic collapse since the 2021 military takeover. The Centre has started fencing the India-Myanmar border, partly over concerns about drug smuggling and narco-terror links.
Why it matters
The focus on money trails, frozen accounts and attached property, rather than seizures alone, reflects the government’s stated push to dismantle the financial networks behind trafficking. Shah tied the operation to the Centre’s target of wiping out every drug network in the country by December 31, 2029, a goal he repeated at a national conference of state anti-narcotics task force chiefs in New Delhi in September, where he called for clear targets and accountability from police forces.
What happens next
Shah has said the home ministry will devote the rest of 2026 and the following three years to the anti-drug campaign, and has asked police forces across the country to commit fully to the Nasha Mukt Bharat roadmap. Alongside enforcement, the Centre’s Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, run by the social justice ministry since August 2020, says it has reached more than 35 crore people. Officials have not yet released details on the accused, the charges they face or where the seized detonators were found.
