With the Independence Day celebrations round the corner, the Punjab Police are on alert as they have gathered fresh Intelligence inputs pointing to a stepped-up effort by Pakistan’s ISI and affiliated terror groups to trigger trouble in the state. Recent attacks on police stations and BJP party offices were already being seen as a part of this pattern, police officials said on Tuesday.An internal assessment based on these inputs, accessed by The Tribune, concluded that the ISI, which has for over a decade sought to destabilise Punjab’s law and order and vitiate communal harmony, had recalibrated and intensified its efforts after Operation Sindoor in May 2025.Facts emerging from recently busted terror modules, tech-based espionage cases and recoveries of weapons and narcotics from across the border, corroborated by reliable Intelligence, pointed to a new multi-pronged ISI strategy, the assessment said.Latest inputs indicated a significant step-up in attack plans for Independence Day 2026 and the period leading up to it.As part of this strategy, pro-Khalistan terrorist nodes, mainly of the Babbar Khalsa International, along with transnational organised criminal networks operating out of Germany, France, Portugal, the UK, Canada, the US and Malaysia among other countries, were being lined up to push large-scale militant hardware into Punjab to foment terror attacks, the inputs suggested.At the same time, the ISI was planning a series of attacks through its own operatives as well as under the cover of pseudo pro-Khalistani entities, a move aimed at ensuring deniability of its direct involvement, police officials said.The range of weapons being pushed in had expanded well beyond established militant hardware such as RDX-based tiffin IEDs, hand grenades, sophisticated automatic weapons and small firearms. Newly designed remote-controlled RDX-based prefabricated IEDs and petrol bombs, low grade, easy to fabricate and equally effective for terror objectives, had also entered the mix, the assessment noted.Targets too had widened. Alongside familiar ones such as police, CAPF and defence establishments, serving and retired Punjab Police personnel linked to counter-terror operations, and offices and leaders of right wing parties, the threat had expanded to random targeting of police personnel, railway infrastructure and other critical infrastructure across Punjab. The shift was also from targeting individuals to targeting places with high footfall, police officials said.In 2026 alone, till July 27, the Punjab Police busted 10 terror modules through Intelligence-led operations and sustained investigation, arresting 137 persons in the process. The recoveries made during these operations included seven automatic rifles, 76 revolvers and pistols, 12 RDX-based prefabricated IEDs, 3.756 kg of RDX, nine detonators, 49 hand grenades, one RPG with launcher and seven walkie talkie sets.Separately, six cases of tech-based espionage were detected and busted, involving the installation of solar-powered CCTV cameras that were feeding live visuals to handlers in Pakistan.During the same period, 183 drones were recovered, police officials said, underlining the scale of the cross border smuggling effort feeding the module network.Police officials said the pattern that had emerged, spanning weapons, espionage and drone activity, would inform the heightened security grid being put in place for Independence Day this year.