Internal Security

About Centre

The Centre focuses on issues that challenge India’s internal security. Secessionist movements based on ethnic identities in the Northeast and Jammu & Kashmir have been contesting the Indian state through violent means for decades. The Left Wing Extremism movement based on Marxist-Leninist ideology is engaged in a struggle to overthrow the democratic structure of the Indian state. Intermittent terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreign and home grown terrorist groups have been disrupting peace and political order in the country. Infiltration, illegal migration, and trafficking of arms and narcotics are not only breaching the country’s international borders but are also aggravating its security situation. The research efforts of the Centre are focused on analysing the trends, patterns, causes, and implications of these threats and challenges, and suggesting policy alternatives. The Centre’s research agenda includes: left wing extremism, insurgencies in the Northeast India, cross border terrorism and militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, global and national trends in terrorism, management of India’s international borders and security of its coasts.

The Centre also undertakes various projects entrusted by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the National Security Council Secretariat on matters internal security. The Centre has a mix of civilian scholars and officers deputed from the armed forces and central armed police forces.

The Centre has a bilateral agreement to collaborate with the Border Security Forces’ Institute for Border Management and Strategic Studies.

Kashmir: Time to Ring the Bell

It is time that the Indian government through its yet-to-be appointed interlocutors clearly laid the limits and boundaries of the autonomy debate to all the stakeholders.

Harinder Singh
October 13, 2010
IDSA Comments

Kashmir: Policy in a Time of Contending Realities

The coexistence of contending realities in Kashmir is a natural corollary of the transition from conflict to peace. A successful transition to peace is not only a test of Indian secularism, but also of Indian democracy.

Arpita Anant
August 31, 2010
IDSA Comments

Is there an Indian concept of security?

If India is indeed interested in being a ‘rule-maker’ in a multilateral world, alternative approaches to persisting problems is the basic component of it.

Mehmet Ozkan
August 11, 2010
IDSA Comments

“Kashmir: Paths to Peace”: A Misleading Report

The Report lends itself to all kinds of interpretations, does not attempt to correlate responses to questions in the same section, and certainly does not provide the ‘paths to peace’.

Arpita Anant
August 10, 2010
IDSA Comments

With Reference to the Context: Militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and the India-Pakistan Dialogue

A survey of media reports in newspapers based in Jammu and Kashmir for 2010 reveals that although violence levels are down there are multiple levels at which militancy affects the state.

Arpita Anant
July 14, 2010
IDSA Comments

AFSPA: A Soldier’s Perspective

An absence of legal statutes in the insurgency affected areas would adversely affect the utility and efficacy of the security capacity of the state.

Always in the Line of Fire

There are no shortcuts to overcoming the grave Naxal threat to our democratic way of life. Broadening the mandate by handing over the problem to the army is neither fair nor efficacious.

Countering the Naxals

The Grid-Guard-Govern strategy would do away with the sequential application of socio-economic solutions by undertaking security-led governance cum development action.

Harinder Singh
June 11, 2010
Issue Brief

Manipur Blockade: A Tale of Vested Political Interests and Exclusivist Narratives

Only social cohesion and determination by local communities to bring about peace can realistically tide over vested political interests and narrow destructive narratives that seem to be informing the present crisis between Manipur and Nagaland.

Learning from Times Square: Socialising the Counterterrorism Approach

Since safeguarding the public space such as mass transportation networks, financial and industrial hubs from sporadic acts of terror is increasingly becoming difficult, socialising citizenry in democratic societies to the needs of counterterrorism assumes salience.