India's Internal Security Challenges

Editor’s note: Today we feature excerpts from our partners at the National Bureau for Asian Research (NBR) and commentaries from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. First we preview the NBR’s May publication India’s Security Challenges at Home and Abroad, which includes an essay by Ajai Sahni detailing the extent of the country’s internal challenges and another by C Raja Mohan on India’s global outlook in a multipolar world. We conclude with perspectives from the RSIS on the internal security situation and on the future of India’s global strategy.

Introduction

India is today an astounding study in contrasts. International pundits have predicted a “global power shift,” with a “transfer of power from West to East,” and some have already anointed India as one of the “great powers” of the proximate future. Among the Indian elite, there is a surging confidence, backed by sustained growth of the economy—a steady 6% growth rate between 1993 and 2003, and a remarkable 9% thereafter. Indeed, despite the global meltdown of 2008, India has sustained a 6%–7% growth rate, notwithstanding the widespread contraction of economies and apprehensions of an enveloping recession in the West. At the same time, a succession of dramatic global acquisitions by Indian companies have forced even the most incredulous to revise their assessments of India’s future. The transformations that underwrite these trends are structural and, most economists believe, irreversible. The consequence, one eminent economist notes, is that “a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that by 2030 India will have a per-capita income of $20,000, which will place us in the category of industrialized nations.”

All of this is very real. But there is another India to which the country’s vaunting elite and much of the world is blind. It is an India of grinding poverty for millions, increasing rural distress, mass suicides by bankrupted farmers, chronic and endemic malnutrition, and vast developmental dislocations that punish the poor. It is an India in which governance is conspicuous by its absence or is experienced only in its most neglectful, callous, and oppressive manifestations.

It must be evident that the tensions between these “two Indias” are fraught with political and security risks, and that the dynamism and growth of the first is potentially jeopardized by the stagnation, inertial resistance, and violent reaction of the second. It is within the context of this entrenched and underlying friction that threats to India’s internal security need to be evaluated.

Assessments of India’s internal security challenges have varied widely over time, often determined by the intensity and lethality of the most recent terrorist outrage—of which there has been a continuous string over the past decades. A succession of high-profile terrorist attacks across India—outside the areas of chronic terrorist and insurgent conflict—through 2008, culminating in the dramatic and devastating attacks in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, thus created an enveloping atmosphere of insecurity in the country, particularly among its vocal urban middle classes, who abruptly saw themselves at great risk.

These general perceptions are in sharp contrast with the actual trajectory of terrorist and insurgent violence in India, which demonstrates clear trends toward the overall diminution of such incidents—albeit within a context of enormous and augmenting uncertainty. The South Asia Terrorism Portal database indicates a decline in total fatalities in terrorist and insurgent violence in India, from a peak of 5,839 in 2001 to 1,074 in 2011. The principal constituent of this declining trajectory has been the steady drop in fatalities in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, from 4,507 in 2001 to 183 in 2011. Fatalities in India’s northeast, after significant declines during 2002–6, escalated in 2007–9—although they still remained well below their peak of 1,667 in 2000—but dropped dramatically to just 247 in 2011. Left-wing extremist (LWE) or Maoist-related killings, after fluctuating within a narrow spectrum between 2002 and 2008, rose sharply to 997 in 2009 and 1,180 in 2010 but dropped to 602 in 2011. The 2005–8 period saw significant fatalities in terrorist incidents classified as “other” (378 in 2008, with 195 accounted for by November 26, 2008, alone); these were principally Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorist attacks in urban areas outside the theaters of chronic violence—incidents that have contributed most to the often-hysterical media assessments of the threat of terrorism, both Indian and foreign. The year 2009, however, witnessed no major incident in this category, while 2010 and 2011 recorded 20 and 42 fatalities, respectively, in such attacks.

A complex dynamic, often related to a range of external factors, has defined these trends, and it remains the case that significant unrealized reserves of potential violence exist in the country, and at least some of these show signs of augmentation. Of course, terrorism and insurgency are not the only internal security crises in India, and this essay will examine a range of micro-fractures that afflict the social and political fabric and challenge the administrative and enforcement apparatus. By and large, these lesser conflicts—including caste and communal conflicts, as well as criminal disruption—appear to have attained a measure of stability over the decades. While poor governance and declining standards of administration—including within the areas of security and justice—have been visible across wide areas in India, it is also the case that vibrant sectors of the economy have now released vast resources that have fundamentally altered national capacities, which could (though they currently may not) be applied to the resolution of the multiple internal security crises confronting the country.

(click here for the full essay, in India's Security Challenges at Home and Abroad)