India slams Pakistan’s Masood Azhar bounty as “gimmicks and hoodwinking attempts”

A UN-designated terrorist, a fake location claim, and a bounty timed to dodge the FATF. India calls it out

September 15, 2026

India has dismissed Pakistan's PKR 70 lakh bounty on Jaish chief Masood Azhar as a hollow, pre-FATF stunt, with intelligence placing him in Pakistan's Sindh province, not Afghanistan as Islamabad claims

Pakistan’s Azhar bounty exposed: same lie, same smokescreen, five years later

New Delhi dismisses Islamabad’s PKR 70 lakh reward on Jaish chief Masood Azhar as a hollow FATF-eve stunt, as Indian intelligence places him not in Afghanistan but hiding in Pakistan’s Sindh province

India has dismissed Pakistan‘s freshly announced PKR 70 lakh bounty on Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as nothing more than a cynical PR exercise, calling it exactly what it looks like: a transparent bid to dodge scrutiny days before the FATF plenary in October. The message from New Delhi was blunt — Islamabad isn’t hunting a terrorist, it’s staging a performance.

The Lie Behind The Listing

Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) put Azhar on its 2026 Red Book of most-wanted terrorists and hiked the reward on him by PKR 20 lakh, up from the PKR 50 lakh figure it first announced back in 2021. There’s just one problem: Pakistan has spent five straight years telling the world Azhar isn’t even in the country. Indian intelligence isn’t buying it. Officials say technical tracking over the past six months places Azhar squarely in Nawabshah, Sindh, shuttling between there and Rawalpindi — not hiding across the border in Afghanistan, as Islamabad insists.

Even the Afghan Taliban has publicly rejected Pakistan’s claim. When the very regime you’re pointing to denies sheltering your most-wanted man, the story falls apart on its own.

A Terrorist The World Already Knows

This isn’t some obscure fugitive Pakistan is scrambling to identify. Azhar is a UN-designated global terrorist, wanted by India’s NIA in five separate cases including the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, and identified as the mastermind behind the 2019 Pulwama attack that killed 40 CRPF personnel. An Interpol Red Corner Notice has stood against him since May 2016. India designated him an individual terrorist under the UAPA back in September 2019. None of that required a fresh Pakistani “discovery” in 2026 — Azhar’s terror record has been a matter of international record for years.

Same Playbook, Same Result

Defence expert Brigadier (Retd) Hemant Mahajan called the bounty hike exactly what Indian officials have long suspected — a smokescreen timed to appease FATF assessors before their October review, not a genuine step toward capture. Pakistan tried this once already: after the 2021 bounty announcement, nothing changed. Azhar wasn’t found. He wasn’t extradited. He wasn’t even meaningfully searched for. He simply continued operating — reportedly even delivering audio messages to JeM cadres, urging them to keep fighting Indian forces in Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan’s operational headquarters for JeM, the Markaz Subhanallah complex in Bahawalpur, once housed Azhar himself alongside JeM’s de facto chief Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar — a facility India’s Armed Forces confirmed destroying during Operation Sindoor. That’s the kind of “action” that actually dents a terror network. A bounty announcement with no arrest, no extradition, and a location claim nobody believes is not that.

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