Delhi Blast 2025: Gurugram Police Orders Housing Societies to Identify Kashmiris, Foreigners

Key Points

The incident has raised criticisms of profiling and sparking communal tensions.

Gurugram Police on Tuesday, 11 November 2025, directed housing societies in the city to identify residents from Jammu & Kashmir and abroad, and submit findings to the police. The notification came a day after a blast near the Red Fort in Delhi, which was allegedly linked to a Pulwama resident and an inter-state terror module.

Further directions have been issued to Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), societies, security agencies, hostels and PGs, hotels, offices, and shopping complexes to verify the identities of tenants, visitors, employees, and workers within the city.

“We are inquiring about who has come from where and for how long they have been staying here,” Vishnu Prasad, ACP of Gurugram City told Scroll, “We are doing this for people from Jammu and Kashmir as well as foreigners. It is for security purposes.”

“We have been instructed to do this,” Prasad said to Hindustan Times, “It is purely for security purposes and is a routine check.”

The order was issued by District Magistrate Ajay Kumar, who said that the order was aimed at increasing security ahead of Christmas, New Years, and Republic Day. The order will stay in effect till 31 January 2026.

The move comes after an explosion near Delhi’s Red Fort on 10 November 2025. The blast has been attributed to a crude bomb and has been designated as a “terrorist incident” by the Union Cabinet. The incident is allegedly linked to a raid earlier that day in Faridabad where nearly 3 tonnes of ammonium nitrate was recovered from a property linked to a Kashmiri doctor. An associate of the doctor – another doctor from Pulwama – has been identified as the perpetrator, who allegedly detonated the car bomb after his associates were arrested.

See Also: In Modi's Delhi, Indian Muslims segregate to seek security

Profiling of Kashmiris and Muslims

The move has caused widespread backlash online and from Gurugram residents. It has been pointed out that the move amounts to profiling and will only raise communal tensions.

“This kind of order might create unnecessary suspicion towards people from certain regions,” a resident told HT, “We all want security, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of profiling an entire community. The focus should be on suspicious behaviour, not identity.”

“This is a precautionary step, not a profiling exercise,” DM Kumar said, “Gurugram is a cosmopolitan city, and our intent is only to ensure safety for everyone through structured verification.”

The notification comes in parallel with large-scale raids in Jammu & Kashmir – across hundreds of locations, with hundreds detained. Random checks in the state and a crackdown on Kashmiri professionals across UP, Haryana, Delhi, etc. have followed the incident.

J&K CM Omar Abdullah has spoken out on the persecution of Kashmiris following the incident: “A very few people are out to disrupt peace and brotherhood here. They should be held accountable. But every person in J&K is not a terrorist or associated with terrorists.”

“The brutal killing of innocent people in this manner is unacceptable. No religion allows this. No amount of condemnation of this incident is enough,” he added.

In the immediate aftermath of the Delhi blast, legacy media, senior journalists, and internet trolls were quick to jump to conclusions. While such a situation makes it hard to access verified information, Indian media was seen flouting the basic ethics of journalism for their stories: tampering with evidence, sharing personal information, publishing unsubstantiated claims, and using emotional and discriminatory language.

Channels were speculating about a connection between the blast and the earlier raid before any official statement was made. And once a connection was suspected, headlines ran rife with terms like ‘jihadi’, pictures of suspects in visually Islamic clothing, and rumours of communal angles behind the blast.

One instance in particular stands as an example of the sensationalism that overtook objectivity: around an hour after the blast, Rahul Shivshanker, senior journalist for News 18, conclusively declared that “Terror has a religion.” He went on to talk about the ‘white-collar jihad’ network and has since doubled down on his profiling by publishing op-eds on the connection between Islam and terrorism.

Meanwhile, the media continues to point fingers at a whole community instead of questioning intelligence lapses – rare mention has been found of the Muslims killed in the attack, the Muslim organisations who have condemned the attack, and the Muslims who are suffering from persecution by communal forces since the attack. [Rh]

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