By Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe
Given the growing strategic partnership between India and the West, situated as the dominant country in South Asia, India’s complex internal and regional security challenges is a topic of expanding interest. Dr Ajai Sahni, who is the executive director of the conservative New Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Management, spoke to Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe about the varied dimensions of India’s ongoing internal security challenges, the impact of transnational threats such as drug trafficking and organised crime, the impact of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the challenges posed by Pakistan.
- How would you best measure and describe the scale of India’s internal security challenges today? Why is India’s internal security situation different to other countries worldwide?
India’s internal security challenges acquire a particular urgency, principally, because of the state’s limited capacities and absence of strategy to deal with these, as well as the extraordinarily hostile regional environment – particularly the role of Pakistan, implicitly supported by China – in exacerbating every existing tension here. The gravest internal security challenge, in fact, is the infirmity of the state. Particular manifestations of violence only reflect the opportunistic exploitation by disruptive elements, internal and external, of the vulnerabilities that have been created over decades of political and strategic incompetence.
The peculiarities of India’s internal security situation arise out of both external and internal factors. The first among the most significant of these is that the country shares a border and a long history of hostility with the principal locus and source of Islamist extremist terrorism in the world, Pakistan. The wider South Asian region is, moreover, a region of great instability and global contestation, and this impacts directly on India’s own stability. Internally, extreme inequalities, inequities and destitution of large proportions of the population combine with abysmal capacities for and quality of governance. The predisposition to political violence, consequently, is great, while the capacities to neutralize this predisposition or its eventual manifestations, is extremely limited.
- Tell us about the Maoists, Naxalites and Left-wing extremists? Is the so called Red Corridor an accurate reflection of the influence of these groups and movements in India? How serious a threat do they pose to India’s internal security?
The creation of a ‘red corridor’ along India’s eastern board has been a long-standing objective of the Left Wing Extremists. This also represents some of the most impoverished, backward and poorly governed regions of the country, and is a natural environment for Maoist mobilization and operation. Over decades, Left Wing Extremist groups, now principally the Communist Party of India – Maoist (CPI-Maoist) have been able to establish a measure of ‘disruptive dominance’ across this region – in effect, using demonstrative acts of extreme violence to obstruct the delivery of public goods by government agencies, and to intimidate large sections of the population. However, no continuous ‘corridor’ has been established.
Unfortunately, there has been some ill-conceived rhetoric about ‘liberated areas’ emanating from some of the highest offices in the country’s security establishment over the past three years, and this has been truly astonishing in some cases. Top officials have spoken of “40,000 square kilometers” ostensibly “liberated” by the Maoists. This is manifest nonsense, and it is clear that these officials are not even aware of the meaning of the expression “liberated area” in the Maoist lexicon. A liberated area exists when the ‘enemy’ has been ‘completely destroyed’, a revolutionary people’s government and Marxist production relations have been established, the Maoist army acquires the character of a regular Army and engages in maneuver or positional warfare with the state’s Forces. These conditions do not prevail in any part of India.
The Maoists do have tremendous capabilities to execute hit and run actions against security forces and other targets. They do not, however, ‘hold’ or administer any significant territories, though there are some amorphous areas where the difficulty of terrain and the possibility of ambush make the state’s forces extremely reluctant to operate. Even in these areas, when any significant Force has been deployed against them, they have quickly withdrawn, avoiding any decisive confrontation.
Nevertheless, the Maoists do constitute, on many parameters, a very significant threat to India’s internal security. This is by far the most widespread rebellion the country has experienced; most other insurrections have been limited to a single State, or smaller areas within States. Despite repeated reverses inflicted on it, Left Wing Extremism has demonstrated tremendous resilience, and has resurrected itself again and again. The Maoist intent appears to be deadly serious, and there is a hard core of ideologically driven leaders who remain relentlessly committed to their goals, and to the expansion of their areas of activity.
However, every time the state’s responses have achieved a degree of strategic clarity and coherence, the movement has been forced into retreat, once again driving home the point that it is the state’s infirmities that create the spaces for Maoist activity and expansion, and not some extraordinary dynamism within this movement. Left Wing Extremism has been defeated in the past, and can be defeated again, if the regime of confusion and collusion, and the false sociologies of ‘root causes’, are removed from the framework of response.
- How accurate are the ongoing media reports which suggest the LTTE is possibly regrouping in Tamil Nadu? Although the group has been defeated in Sri Lanka to what extent can the LTTE and its associated ideology of Tamil separatism still present a threat to India’s interests?
There are significant pockets of sympathy for the LTTE in Tamil Nadu, and this is reflected fairly clearly in the ambivalence and ambiguity that the State Government and political leadership tries to maintain on issues relating to this group, and the broader question of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. Some surviving elements of the rank and file of the LTTE have also trickled into the State. However, they have a very low profile, and there is little possibility of their using Tamil Nadu as any kind of base for an armed regrouping.
Nevertheless, Tamil Nadu will continue to be a source of at least some propaganda and political mobilization on the Tamil issue in Sri Lanka. This will continue to create embarrassing diplomatic hiccups in Indo-Sri Lanka relationships, and may make the Union Government squirm from time to time. But there is no possibility of this sentiment being translated into an armed movement, or support for an armed movement, in the foreseeable future, nor does it constitute any sustained threat to either Indian or Sri Lankan interests.
- How is India’s homeland security being affected by drug-trafficking and associated organised criminal activities linked to the regions that make up the Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle?
Drug money, particularly from the Golden Crescent areas, has long funded Pakistan backed terrorism against India. Some regions, including, for instance, the Indian province of Punjab, have a strong overlap between the activities of Pakistan-backed Khalistani terrorists and drug smugglers, and the easy availability of drugs in the State has had a tremendous and adverse impact on the population. According to one report citing the Government’s own submissions to the High Court in 2009, 75 per cent of Punjab’s youth, one in every three college students, and 65 per cent of all families were affected by drug addiction, and 30 per cent of all jail inmates had been arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.
The drug trade and drug money also played a significant role in the insurgencies in India’s Northeast at one time. However, with the progressive weakening of these insurgencies, and a decline in flows of drugs from the Golden Triangle area, this is less of a problem today. Nevertheless, a residual impact by way of a fairly easy availability of drugs has created a relatively high incidence of drug dependency and addiction in the region.
Drug trafficking is a significant element in the operation of organised criminal groups as well, and generates significant revenues for them. This is, however, one among a wide range of organised criminal activities that a poorly manned and equipped enforcement apparatus has to deal with, and it has no overwhelming influence on the crime or security profile of the country today.
- What are the range of cross-border security challenges that India continues to face specifically with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, China, Maldives and Nepal?
In terms of internal security challenges emanating from these various sources, the movement of large numbers of migrants, both legal and illegal, particularly from Bangladesh (illegal) and Nepal (legal), creates some persistent difficulties. These migrant inflows disturb established population equations across wide swathes of Indian territory, and have contributed to a great deal of political instability and periodic violence.
All these countries, with the exception of the Maldives, have also, from time to time, been used as operational bases, centres of facilitation, or safe havens, or as sources of material support, for insurgent and terrorist groupings operating on Indian soil. Bangladesh and Bhutan, at one time, provided safe haven to a number of insurgent groups operating in India’s Northeast, though the problem was brought to an end in Bhutan in 2003 and, since 2009, Bangladesh has also acted with determination against these groups on its soil.
Myanmar remains an important safe haven for such groups even now, largely because the Government there does not exercise adequate control over some of its own rebellious territories, and due to increasing Chinese support. Maldives is also emerging as a potential source of Islamist terrorist facilitation, mobilization and activity. China has become one of the most significant sources for illegal flows of small arms to insurgent groupings in India’s Northeast, and through them, to the Maoists as well. Nepal and Bangladesh remain important transits for the flow of large quantities of fake Indian currency notes that are pumped into India by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
- How serious is the threat posed to India by militant non-state actors in Pakistan? How is India’s homeland security likely to be affected by the withdrawal of the US coalition from Afghanistan post-2014? What could the possible re-emergence of Taliban control throughout southern Afghanistan mean for India’s future security and regional interests?
Terrorist groups supported by the Pakistani state apparatus have been among the most significant internal security threats for India over the past nearly three decades. There has been a downswing in their activities since the 9/11 incidents due to a range of pressures, internal and external, that have built up in Pakistan. Pakistan, today, is confronted with a major terrorist ‘blowback’ on its own soil, as Islamist terrorist groups created by state agencies turn against their creators. Pakistan’s most urgent priority is to recover dominance in Afghanistan through its Taliban proxies. Pakistani activities have also come under a global microscope for the past decade, diminishing spaces for ‘credibly deniable’ terrorist operations on Indian soil. All this has provided some relief to India, as a result of which the Islamist terrorist separatism in Jammu & Kashmir has lost steam, and Islamist terrorist activities across the country have also registered diminishing trends.
In the unlikely eventuality that Pakistan secures its objectives in Afghanistan, and is able to ‘recover’ Kabul through its Taliban proxies after 2014, a wave of Islamist extremist triumphalism would result in unprecedented terrorism across the Asian region, perhaps into Europe, and would certainly impact drastically on India. This, however, is a remote possibility, since it is now evident that the US would retain a substantial military presence in Afghanistan after 2014, at a projected minimum of 25,000 troops, including Special Forces contingents.
The likelihood, then, is that insurgent and terrorist activities would continue in Afghanistan after 2014, but that Kabul would not be ‘overrun’, resulting in a bleeding stalemate for at least some time. Given Pakistan’s growing vulnerabilities, and the increasing likelihood of escalating punitive action against that country by the US, it is unlikely that Pakistan can continue with its terrorist enterprise in Afghanistan indefinitely. It may be able to sustain existing patterns of support to the Taliban for some time, but without any dramatic gains, and with rising risks, both of internal disorders and punitive action by the US.
As long as such a situation persists, Pakistan’s capacities to intensify its terrorist campaigns against India would remain limited. Internal troubles, the more urgent (from a Pakistani perspective) Afghan campaigns, and international scrutiny will tend to limit Pakistan’s operations on Indian soil, though the Pakistani intent and strategy remains substantially unchanged.
