On September 29, Indian security forces ended a gunfight in Gurwatkalan, Budgam district of Jammu and Kashmir, with a commander of the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba dead. Beside his body lay not a phone but a rugged black handset stamped “LoRa Ultra”. It carried no SIM card, needed no mobile tower and never touched the internet. The recovery tells a clear story. India’s surveillance grid has pushed terror networks so hard that they have abandoned the phone altogether.
For two decades, terrorist communication has been one of India’s sharpest weapons against terrorists themselves. Call records, tower data, intercepts and seized handsets have helped Indian security agencies dismantle module after module, forcing handlers in Pakistan to keep searching for a channel India cannot read. LoRa is their latest attempt. The question is not whether India can counter it, but how fast its technology, its laws and its security institutions can close the gap.
LoRa, short for Long Range, was built for the Internet of Things. It sends tiny packets of data over long distances on very little battery power, which is why it is used worldwide in smart meters and farm sensors. Its core technique, chirp spread spectrum, transmits slow, sweeping signals that a receiver can pick out even when they are fainter than background noise. The trade-off is speed. A few kilobits per second carries a short text, a GPS location or an SOS alert, and nothing more.
That is exactly what terror handlers want. No telecom operator sits between sender and receiver, so there is no subscriber record. Indian security officials assess usable range at 10 to 15 kilometres through forest, and more from a ridge line. Handsets relay one another’s messages, so every device acts as a tower; destroy one and the mesh reroutes. Many commercial modules can also be retuned well outside India’s legal frequency band with a simple software setting. The same chip that reads a water meter in an Indian city can carry an attack order across the Pir Panjal, the mountain range that divides the Kashmir Valley from the Jammu region.
Indian agencies have tracked this shift for years. Terrorists have combined LoRa with encrypted messaging, China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system and Thuraya satellite phones, while Pakistan has expanded telecom towers along the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, to push signals into Indian territory. Each move has been a reaction to Indian pressure. LoRa is simply the quietest option left.
Nor is the hardware improvised. Forensic analysis by India’s National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), the country’s technical intelligence agency, has established that the handsets arrive pre-configured and pre-encrypted, linked directly to handlers across the Line of Control. That matches what Indian forces found during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, India’s precision strikes on terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir after the massacre of Hindu tourists at Pahalgam. One target was a communications hub of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed at Sarjal, in Pakistan’s Punjab province. According to Indian officials, it relayed traffic for LoRa “Ultra Sets” built by Chinese manufacturers for the Pakistan Army and passed to terrorists through Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The Sarjal strike proved India can reach this network at its source.
The division of labour is plain: Pakistan supplies the intent, China supplies the technology. In July 2025, India’s Deputy Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Rahul R. Singh, said China had given Pakistan live inputs during Operation Sindoor, and that roughly 81 percent of Pakistan’s military hardware is Chinese. China claims the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, occupies Aksai Chin and treats India as a strategic rival. Equipping the communications backbone of terror cells in Jammu and Kashmir fits a long pattern of using Pakistan to keep India tied down. The world should see LoRa in Jammu and Kashmir for what it is: a state-backed capability, not a terrorist improvisation.
The encouraging part is that a transmitting radio is still a physical signal, and Indian forces are hunting it. After Operation Mahadev, the July 2025 operation in which Indian forces killed the terrorists behind the Pahalgam massacre, officials said agencies could narrow a LoRa transmission to an area of three to five kilometres. That is a lead ground teams can work, and better sensors will keep tightening it. Indian security forces have recalibrated spectrum scanners and jammers for the forest belts of South Kashmir, adapting within months of the threat emerging. Every captured handset deepens the picture. The two sets recovered in Operation Mahadev went to NTRO, where configuration data, contacts and logs can expose the wider network and the handlers behind it.
The next step is persistent spectrum sensing across border districts: a permanent web of sensors on ridges and posts that maps normal radio activity, so any terrorist transmission stands out the moment it begins. India’s own defence electronics industry can build these detection and direction-finding systems, keeping the capability sovereign.
India’s law is equally ready for this fight. The Telecommunications Act, 2023, which replaced the colonial-era Telegraph and Wireless Telegraphy laws, gives the Indian government clear power to set standards for radio equipment, regulate its possession and use, and act on grounds of national security. That framework allows mandatory type approval that locks devices to the legal band, registration and traceable sales of long-range modules in sensitive districts, and closer customs scrutiny of configurable hardware. Under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, India’s principal anti-terror law, supplying or moving such equipment for a terror group brings couriers and suppliers within reach of terror charges.
Technology and law work best when the institutions using them work as one. NTRO, the Indian Army, the Border Security Force, the Central Reserve Police Force, the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the telecom ministry’s spectrum wing each bring signals expertise. A joint radio-intelligence cell for Jammu and Kashmir, working from a shared real-time picture, would multiply what each already does well. India has built this kind of fusion before in its counter-infiltration grid along the Line of Control, with proven results.
Radios do not carry themselves. The local support networks that move, charge and supply these devices are exposed links in the chain, and Indian agencies have been steadily dismantling them. Human intelligence remains the thread that ties the signal to the terrorist.
India should also place the Pakistan-China supply channel firmly on the international record, backed by NTRO’s forensic evidence. On India’s border with Pakistan in Punjab, commercial drones once seemed equally hard to stop; the Border Security Force has since built a counter-drone capability that intercepts them routinely. LoRa is the same kind of challenge. The handset in Budgam is proof that India’s pressure is working. The task now is to follow the terrorists onto their last network.
