On May 7, in a press briefing that has now gripped national attention, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri named TRF while justifying India’s retaliatory measures against Pakistan. According to Misri, TRF is nothing more than a facade, a digital mask, worn by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), one of Pakistan’s most notorious terror outfits. Though no direct evidence was presented during the briefing, the signs are disturbingly familiar.
The pattern is consistent.
A brazen terror attack, this time in Pahalgam. TRF claims responsibility through a fleeting social media post, only to retract it later, blaming unauthorised access to their accounts. This attempt to sow confusion is neither new nor surprising. It’s part of a carefully calibrated information warfare strategy: plausible deniability, masked intentions, and psychological manipulation.
TRF was born in the ashes of August 2019, right after Article 370 was abrogated and Jammu and Kashmir's special status was revoked. What began as a social media propaganda outfit has since evolved into a fully armed insurgent group, now claiming deadly attacks with alarming frequency. Its fingerprints are all over some of the most heinous ambushes in recent memory from the killing of senior security officials in Handwara, Kulgam, and Anantnag to the brutal murder of migrant workers and a doctor in Ganderbal.
Each attack is a scar on the conscience of the nation. Each bullet fired under the TRF banner is a message: that terrorism has not been extinguished, only rebranded.
In January 2023, India finally declared TRF a terrorist organization under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), naming its alleged founder, Sheikh Sajjad Gul, as a designated terrorist. The charges are grave: inciting youth, spreading radical propaganda online, and smuggling weapons into the valley.
But the bigger question remains: Why TRF? and Why now? The answer lies in global geopolitics and Pakistan’s diplomatic calculus. Since 2016, Pakistan has faced mounting pressure from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to curb terrorist financing and dismantle extremist infrastructure. With the threat of blacklisting looming large, terror groups like LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed needed to disappear; at least on paper. What emerged instead were local-sounding, faceless new fronts: TRF in Kashmir Valley and PAFF (People’s Anti-Fascist Front) in Jammu’s Rajouri and Poonch districts.
These groups are not spontaneous grassroots movements. They are tactical evolutions, an attempt to disguise cross-border jihad as indigenous rebellion. It’s a cynical strategy, designed to mislead the world and confuse the conflict’s true nature.
Military analysts argue that such proxy outfits operate under strategic detachment. When pressure builds or international scrutiny intensifies, they recede into the shadows. But when they feel forgotten or irrelevant, they strike again to remind their handlers, and their ideological base, that they are still “useful.”
This grim dance of violence, withdrawal, and resurgence is the reality India faces in Kashmir today. It is not merely a security issue. It is a war of narratives, symbols, and identity.
The global community must wake up to this charade. The world cannot afford to see Kashmir through the outdated binary of nationalism versus separatism. The battlefield has shifted. The weapons are not just AK-47s, but encrypted messages, viral videos, and fake narratives of “resistance.”
India, for its part, must strike a careful balance responding with strength, but not surrendering to provocation. Intelligence coordination, cyber surveillance, community engagement, and diplomatic pressure on Pakistan must work in tandem. Most importantly, the people of Kashmir must not be made collateral damage in this geopolitical chessboard. They are victims too, caught between militant propaganda and militarized responses.
The time has come to call TRF what it is: not a resistance front, but a recycled terror front. And in that recognition lies the first step toward dismantling the latest mask of militancy.