Operation Sindoor highlighted the growing importance of intelligence fusion, international liaison, and technology-driven coordination in India’s evolving approach to warfare and counterterrorism
This article is part of the essay series: From Response to Reorientation: One Year of Operation Sindoor
Two weeks after Pakistan-sponsored terrorists killed 26 civilians in cold blood in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, India’s armed forces launched Operation Sindoor—a brief but intense military campaign aimed at establishing deterrence through the targeted destruction of cross-border terror infrastructure. Launched on 7 May 2025, Operation Sindoor was the subcontinent’s first non-contact war and was therefore undergirded in every aspect by intricate intelligence architectures. Data points appearing on command-and-control centre screens along the border were mapped and used to execute subsequent missile strikes in a geopolitical context where the use of ground forces was unfeasible. At the same time, India’s air defences were enabled by the constant torrent of real-time multi-sensor data to precisely intercept the barrage of missiles and drones launched by Pakistan under Operation Bunyanum Marsoos, thus ensuring minimal damage to civilian lives and property.
Operation Sindoor was the subcontinent’s first non-contact war and was therefore undergirded in every aspect by intricate intelligence architectures.
A year on, India has made notable improvements to its intelligence apparatus. Its foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and its military intelligence service, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), along with their respective subsidiaries, have expanded their liaison networks with partners both in the neighbourhood and beyond to counter Pakistan’s efforts to undermine India’s national security. Strategists in South Block (now Seva Teerth) have also undertaken various reforms to step up capacity-building across all levels of national security and defence, including within intelligence. By analysing these twin trajectories following the 11 May 2025 ceasefire, this article examines the lasting impact of Operation Sindoor on India’s national intelligence architecture over the past year.
Encouraged by the success of Operation Sindoor and with a sharpened realisation of the national security threat posed by the ISI in its neighbourhood, India has expanded its liaison agreements with partner agencies in the region and beyond. In recent years, the ISI has sought to harness instability in India’s neighbourhood—particularly in Bangladesh and Myanmar—and the proliferation of diasporic terror networks to its advantage, deepening ties with both sets of actors to undermine India’s national security. In response, India’s counter-strategy since May 2025 has sought to leverage intelligence liaison to undercut Pakistan’s influence.
Encouraged by the success of Operation Sindoor and with a sharpened realisation of the national security threat posed by the ISI in its neighbourhood, India has expanded its liaison agreements with partner agencies in the region and beyond.
Under the interregnum regime of Muhammad Yunus in Dhaka between August 2024 and February 2026, the ISI rapidly expanded its intelligence networks and its cooperation with terrorist organisations such as Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), with Lt. Gen. Asim Malik, Director-General of the ISI, visiting Dhaka in January 2025. Amid a downturn in bilateral relations between New Delhi and Dhaka during this period, the ISI sought to capitalise on Bangladesh’s potential as an alternative launchpad for cross-border operations against India, including weaponised migration similar to Russia’s actions against NATO’s eastern flank in 2021, the reconstruction of intelligence networks hollowed out under Sheikh Hasina’s administration, and support for groups such as the JMB, in line with Pakistan’s decades-long encouragement of cross-border terrorism against India. In Myanmar, the ISI has exploited the opportunities presented by the country’s ongoing civil war to expand intelligence networks and develop ties with a range of insurgent outfits, while maintaining links with anti-India separatist groups operating from safe havens in Myanmar, such as the United Liberation Front of Asom (Independent) (ULFA-I). The ISI’s most notable success in Myanmar has been the stitching together of the ‘Four Brothers Alliance’ in January 2025, comprising four Rohingya insurgent organisations with close ties to organised criminal syndicates and a presence in India.
Operation Sindoor injected a sense of urgency into Indian intelligence efforts to curtail the national security threat posed by the ISI along its eastern borders. Communication channels run by the R&AW, DIA, and the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) with Bangladesh’s Directorate-General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) have helped partially resolve tensions with Bangladesh and, hopefully, counteract the terror and intelligence networks built by the ISI in the country between 2024 and 2026. Similarly, in Myanmar, the DIA and DMI have maintained constant lines of dialogue with their counterparts on shared security concerns stemming from terrorism. In July 2025, the DMI and DIA also coordinated drone strikes and special forces operations against the safe havens of the Pakistan-backed ULFA-I in Myanmar, signalling intent and a willingness to adopt kinetic measures to counteract the ISI’s presence in the country.
Operation Sindoor injected a sense of urgency into Indian intelligence efforts to curtail the national security threat posed by the ISI along its eastern borders.
Beyond the neighbourhood, restored ties with Canada following a downturn in 2023 caused by then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assertions of Indian involvement in the death of ISI-linked Khalistani agitator Hardeep Singh Nijjar have also enabled closer liaison between the R&AW and its Canadian counterparts. In February 2026, following discussions between India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval and Canada’s NSA Nathalie Drouin, both sides agreed to exchange security liaison officers (SLOs) to share intelligence on issues such as ISI-backed Khalistani extremism and organised crime. Shaped once again by the urgency of countering ISI-backed terrorism that gripped India’s strategic community in the immediate aftermath of Operation Sindoor, this agreement holds great promise for combating the threat posed to Indian national security by the ISI from distant geographies such as North America.
India has also significantly modernised its intelligence capacities in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor. The intelligence-centric demands of future warfare, particularly the growing need for intelligence platforms to sustain the rising demand for faster intelligence synthesis and dissemination, have factored into recent updates to the functioning of the Multi Agency Centre (MAC), the nodal platform through which intelligence and data are transmitted to all 28 military, police, and civilian intelligence agencies of India, with the MAC now incorporating new AI/MML software to process and synthesise intelligence at greater pace. In August 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also announced the development of Mission Sudarshan Chakra, an indigenous air defence system underpinned by real-time access to national intelligence databases and sensor data across multiple sources. Both initiatives underscore the emphasis within India’s strategic community on accelerating intelligence analysis and real-time dissemination to end users, driven by lessons learned during Operation Sindoor and the advent of non-contact war in the Indian subcontinent.
Operation Sindoor also underscored the persistent threat of Pakistan-backed terrorism in India and catalysed efforts towards an intelligence-driven national counterterrorism strategy in the form of PRAHAAR. Launched in February 2026, PRAHAAR is linked to a new wave of intelligence reforms across India, explicitly demanding the eradication of operational silos among its nodal agencies, the MAC, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and its subsidiary agency, the Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI), and requiring them to coordinate in real time on counterterrorism efforts, including through the harvesting of large-scale social media data and its validation across multiple technological and human intelligence sources.
India has also significantly modernised its intelligence capacities in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor.
India has also sought to build upon its intelligence successes and has learned from key vulnerabilities identified during Operation Sindoor. The success of encrypted handheld communications platforms, such as the SAMBHAV smartphones, ensured that information exchanged among field commanders remained protected from interception by foreign powers during the conflict. This capability may be further enhanced by recent breakthroughs in indigenous quantum technology, most notably the development of a 1,000 km quantum network in April 2026. This advancement holds significant promise for India’s intelligence community as it explores theoretically unbreakable communications networks for future crises. Likewise, the purchase of Maxar satellite imagery during the conflict by Pakistan-based, ISI-linked resellers such as Business Systems International highlighted the counterintelligence vulnerabilities faced by India’s military and intelligence agencies in an era of pervasive open-source intelligence (OSINT) and commercial satellite imagery. India appears to have learned from this, with the Integrated Defence Staff announcing steps towards establishing a dedicated imagery intelligence unit, the Defence Geospatial Agency (DGA), to limit the counterintelligence challenges posed by adversaries’ unrestricted access to commercial satellite imagery during both peacetime and wartime.
As we mark a year of Operation Sindoor, it is worth noting that the ceasefire of 11 May was just that—a pause, not a definitive end. In that vein, India must learn the intelligence lessons of the past war even as it looks to the next.
Archishman Ray Goswami is a Non-Resident Junior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation and a DPhil candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford.
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Archishman Ray Goswami is a Non-Resident Associate Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. His work focusses on the intersections ...
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