NEW DELHI: Masood Azhar ’s Jaish-e-Mohammad continues to be Pakistan intelligence agency, ISI’s most favoured group for terror attacks in India, after Lashkar-e-Taiba made way for it two years ago.Intelligence sources in Srinagar told the TOI that Jaish, which has been involved in suicide attacks in Kashmir since its launch in 2000, emerged as a stronger contender against Hafiz Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Taiba after the latter’s parent organization Jamaat-ud-Dawah announced to enter mainstream politics. Even as its political organization Milli Muslim League (MML) was denied the permission to contest, the Dawah fielded around 260 candidates under a different registered political party Allah-o-Akbar Tehreek in Pakistan’s 2018 assembly and general elections.As a result, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), emboldened by China's repeated blockage of India's bid to designate Azhar a terrorist at the United Nations, decided to spend most of its resources on the Jaish. Last year, after China clearly told New Delhi that it was not going to blacklist him, Azhar issued a threat to the BJP government over Ram Mandir, saying that his men were ready to lay down their lives and burn down the temple if it was built.Founder of Jaish, Azhar is mastermind of several deadly terrorist attacks in India, including the one on Uri military base in Kashmir in 2016 in which 17 security personnel were killed. Though he was detained for a while under ‘protective custody’ after the Pathankot terror attack, he has been freely and actively holding public rallies and organizing recruitment camps for the Jaish since 2016. In the early 90s, Azhar travelled in Middle East, Africa and the UK to raise funds for Islamist jihad in Kashmir and continues to have a massive following in Pakistan’s Punjab province.Incidentally, Azhar, who was released by India in exchange for the passengers of the hijacked IC814 plane, unlike other chiefs of terror groups based in Pakistan (Hafiz Saeed and Syed Salahuddin), has committed his own family to the jihadist war in Kashmir. He has been sending several of his young nephews to recruit, train and organize terrorists in Kashmir and launch terror attacks.It became apparent two years ago, when his nephew, Talha Rashid, was killed in an encounter with security forces in Pulwama. His another nephew Mohammad Usman was killed in a gun-battle in Tral. Usman was believed to have targeted and killed eight soldiers in over a dozen attacks. According to intelligence sources, Mohammed Umer, son of Azhar’s elder brother Ibrahim, also infiltrated into Jammu and Kashmir last year. NIA, in 2018, filed a chargesheet against Masood Azhar’s brother and Jaish’s deputy chief Maulana Abdul Rouf Asgar for planning the attack on an Army camp in Nagrota in November 2016.Intelligence sources believe that the Pulwama suicide bombing on Thursday, is also a handiwork of Asgar.