The Talk
India is, today, a study in contrasts, with a startling dynamism contending with multiple, overlapping and enduring stratifications, against the backdrop of an increasingly fractious democracy. As the country’s complex and polarized identities are harnessed by an unscrupulous politics, spaces emerge for competitive extremism, insurgency and terrorism. Incoherent policies and colossal deficits in capacities of response hobble internal security management, even as a range of external destabilizers compounds internal instability.
Recent trends in major internal conflicts in India – Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorism, the Maoist insurgency, and the ethnic fundamentalist insurgencies of India’s Northeast – have all registered dramatic declines in indices of violence. This gives reason, of course, for some satisfaction; but those who study India’s security recognize that, while violence may have diminished, the nation’s vulnerabilities abide. Some of these vulnerabilities have, indeed, been deepened by the very forces of development that have benefited many, but that have, equally, caused distress to others in an environment where “scarcity and abundance coexist”.
Much of the recent ‘relief’, moreover, is the result of extraneous factors rather than the sagacity of policy or the effectiveness of enforcement. While the mounting crises of capacity, not only within the security apparatus, but across the wider spectrum of governance, is increasingly emphasised in the policy discourse, little has been done over the past years to address it. Real capacity augmentation has been, at best marginal, while flashy and ineffective – indeed, often counter- productive – institutional and legislative innovations have created an illusion of political ‘action’.
Worse, there are hard limits to the very possibility of creating the capacities, which are urgently needed if India’s internal security vulnerabilities are to be plugged and the faultlines of its fragile social and political system are to be stabilized.
While rapid economic growth has increased state resources, the policy environment remains crippled by the lack of a strategic culture and foresight. A fragmented system, enfeebled by legal and structural infirmities, has eroded national capacities to deal effectively with threats to the nation’s security. At the same time, rapid processes of contemporary transformation continue to produce enormous potential for discord, even as they feed a number of enduring internal conflicts.
India’s existing and substantially degraded institutions have little capacity to act with the clarity and determination that is necessary for effective internal security management, and the containment of the threat of terrorism and extremist political violence. Worse, the state continues to persist with failed response paradigms, even as the possibility of necessary transformations is constantly undermined by a muddled discourse, diversionary and theatrical innovations, and outright corruption.
Dr Sahni’s talk examines a wide spectrum of India’s internal security vulnerabilities – her ‘faultlines’ – and the capacities and strategies, both existing and potential, to address these.