In a sweeping two-day crackdown across Gurdaspur district, Punjab Police executed Operation Prahaar-4.0 — the latest salvo in the state's Gangsteran Te Vaar campaign — pulling in 371 arrests and seizing a cache of narcotics and weapons that lays bare the scale of the trafficking problem in one of Punjab's most porous border belts.

What the Gurdaspur sweep turned up

The haul from Operation Prahaar-4.0 is specific and telling: two pistols with four live cartridges, 448 grams of heroin, 110 intoxicant pills, and Rs 8,920 in drug money recovered alongside the arrests. The Chief Minister's Office of Punjab confirmed the figures on Monday, August 10, 2026, framing the operation explicitly under the twin hashtags #YudhNashianVirudh (War Against Drugs) and #GangsteranTeVaar.

Gurdaspur is not a random choice of theatre. The northern Punjab district shares a border with Pakistan and sits astride smuggling corridors that feed into what security analysts call the Golden Crescent pipeline — the heroin and synthetic-drug supply chain that has devastated Punjab's youth for over two decades. A two-day operation yielding this volume of arrests signals a concentrated, intelligence-led sweep rather than routine patrolling.

Prahaar in the wider Gangsteran Te Vaar arc

Operation Prahaar-4.0 is the fourth iteration of a series, which means the state has now run at least four named enforcement surges under the broader Gangsteran Te Vaar ('War Against Gangsters') umbrella. The Bhagwant Mann government, in office since March 2022, has made simultaneous pressure on drug networks and organised criminal gangs a signature of its law-and-order posture — a deliberate pivot from the perception that Punjab's drug crisis had been politically tolerated for years.

Punjab Police has a long institutional history of district-level anti-narcotics drives, but the current series distinguishes itself by branding operations and publicising granular seizure data — a communications strategy designed to demonstrate accountability and deter trafficking networks in parallel.

Border district, persistent pressure

Gurdaspur's geography makes it a recurring flashpoint. Cross-border drone drops and tunnel-linked smuggling have kept the district in focus for both state police and central security agencies. The 371 arrests in a single two-day window suggest the operation targeted not just street-level users but the mid-tier networks that distribute narcotics once they cross the border — the layer that links supply to the retail trade reaching Punjab's villages and towns.

With adjacent districts watching, the pressure is now on Punjab Police to sustain the tempo. The next test will be whether follow-up operations roll out across neighbouring districts and whether the state's rehabilitation infrastructure can absorb the human fallout from a campaign that is, at its core, as much a public-health crisis as a law-enforcement one.