On the morning of October 23, a school in New Delhi was plunged into a sudden, chilling silence. Students who had barely settled into their classrooms were startled by an announcement, then hurried through corridors under the watchful eyes of teachers, their backpacks left behind, their questions unanswered. A threat had arrived by email, and its subject line was blunt and terrifying: “Bombs Placed in Your Building.” The words did not read like a prank or a joke, not to the principal who opened the message, not to the staff who scrambled to execute emergency protocols, and not to the…

The story arrived under a Varanasi dateline, but it unfolded in the countryside of Azamgarh, where a young man’s telephone call sent a police station into motion. On October 21, Mithilesh Gautam, a 23-year-old from Khetapur village, spoke to officers at the Raunapar police station with the breathlessness of someone who had just escaped death. He said that three men on a motorcycle had cornered him on Deoria Road, fired a gun, and yanked away his handbag. Inside the bag, he added, were four lakh rupees and two gold chains—a sum that, for any ordinary villager, would represent years of…