The US Justice Department’s Operation ‘Hard Ball’, announced on 7 July, is being read across capitals as a demonstration of what coordinated enforcement can achieve against organized crime that respects no border. 24 arrests across the United States, Canada, and Europe, more than fifty search warrants, three unsealed indictments, and 37 charged defendants, drawn from syndicates that recruit and kill across continents, mark one of the largest joint actions against criminal enterprises. For New Delhi, the significance runs deeper than the arrest figures. The networks at the center of the case were reportedly based in India, tested their methods on Indian victims, and cannot finally be dismantled without Indian cooperation. That combination places India not at the margins of this effort but close to its center.
The indictments describe the criminal enterprises led by the jailed Punjab gangster Lawrence Bishnoi and JagguBhagwanpuria, alongside the Canada-based network of Ravinder Singh Dhanda, as sprawling operations running murder for hire, extortion, weapons trafficking, and the movement of bulk narcotics across several continents. The Bhagwanpuria group alone is said to count more than a thousand members and associates worldwide, directing extortion through encrypted messaging and running its affairs with contraband phones smuggled into prison.
India encountered these outfits long before Los Angeles or Vancouver did. Importantly, these gangs have conducted some high-profile targeted killings in different parts of India. The Bishnoi organization and its associate Satinderjeet Singh, known as Goldy Brar, claimed the assassination of the singer Sidhu Moose Wala in Punjab in May 2022. The same network has been linked to the killing of the Maharashtra politician Baba Siddique in Mumbai in October 2024 and to a sustained campaign of threats against prominent public figures. Therefore, India brings to any joint effort a body of knowledge on these syndicates, their personnel, their financing, and their prison-run command structures that few partners can match.
Officials in Ottawa, from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police(RCMP), acknowledged that New Delhi had cooperated with the investigation, and prosecutors indicated that continued cooperation among American, Canadian, Spanish and Indian agencies is expected as the cases proceed. India’s cooperative posture rests on a settled position in international law as it ratified the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its three protocols in 2011, accepting obligations that cover trafficking in persons, the smuggling of migrants, and the illicit manufacture and trafficking of firearms.
That commitment reflects a consistent doctrine and the country has treated human trafficking, illegal migration rackets, narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, forged documentation, and narco-terror linkages as connected threats rather than as separate offenses to be handled in isolation. It has worked through INTERPOL notices, extradition requests, and joint investigations to identify and disrupt syndicates operating across jurisdictions, and has repeatedly sought the return of fugitives who fled Indian jurisdiction to the safety of Western cities. Operation Hard Ball fits that template exactly, and New Delhi’sframework of commitments makes it a ready partner rather than a reluctant one.
Transnational organized crimes cannot be defeated by domestic policing alone. No single country can see the whole criminal enterprise or reach all of its parts alone. The response has to be as borderless as the crime, built on intelligence-led operations, joint investigations, shared watchlists, coordinated prosecutions, and functioning extradition. The recent operation shows that the model is working, with agencies across three continents – North America, Europe, and Asia – assembling a single case against groups that use illegal narco trafficking to fund other widespread, abhorrent criminal activities and that have exploited jurisdictional gaps.
That pattern is not confined to a single region or a country. Across the world, local gangs have plugged themselves into borderless narcotics supply chains, and in a growing number of cases, they now serve as instruments of state policy. In the Golden Crescent, Pakistan-based networks push heroin and hashish into global markets and have long fused narcotics profits with the financing of terror. In the Americas, the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, which Washington formally designated as foreign terrorist organizations in early 2025, move cocaine and fentanyl through supply chains that reach deep into North American cities, a trade whose death toll pushed Washington to recast the cartels as security threats rather than ordinary law-enforcement targets. The Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, for its part, has carried its extortion and trafficking rackets across the hemisphere, from Santiago to New York. What was once dismissed as a policing nuisance now sits squarely within the domain of national security.
Similarly, in Europe, Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta has become the wholesale broker of the continent’s cocaine trade, laundering its proceeds through legitimate business on several continents. In Sweden, the Foxtrot network, sanctioned by the United States in 2025 and by the United Kingdom soon after, graduated from drug dealing and contract killing to staging attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe on behalf of Iran’s intelligence service, including a 2024 assault on the Israeli embassy in Stockholm. That case is the clearest warning of where this is heading. When a state can rent a narcotics gang to attack a diplomatic mission, the line between organized crime and geopolitics has effectively dissolved, and the instruments built to fight one must now be turned against the other.Meeting that challenge requires a framework equal to its scale.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as custodian of the Palermo Convention against transnational organized crime, remains the natural hub for this work, supported by INTERPOL’s system of international notices and by the Financial Action Task Force’s controls on illicit money. Yet these instruments become real capabilities only when member states act promptly on shared intelligence, honor their extradition obligations, and refuse to treat notices and sanctions designations as bargaining chips. The recurring weakness is politicization, with wanted men shielded by geopolitical rivalry, local compulsions, and early warnings from affected states, including those such as India that flagged these networks years ago, too often left unheeded. Proactive cooperation, rather than selective enforcement, is what will finally close the space in which these enterprises have learned to thrive
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