India’s Threat Exposure Threat exposure is the possibility that an adversary can exploit a weakness in a digitally dependent system and produce harmful consequences. It is wider than a list of hacking incidents. Exposure arises from the interaction of dependency, attack surface, adversary capability and consequence. Digital dependence Attack surface Threat actor Compromise Cascading consequence…
Cyber security is the protection of information, devices, computer resources, communication systems and the digital processes built upon them against unauthorised access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction. The object is not merely to keep data secret; it is to preserve trusted digital functioning. This distinction matters for internal security. A payment network may hold…
This dimension of the frontier is the one directly overhead. Air is the fastest medium of attack and the hardest to fence, and secured airspace is a necessary layer of defence alongside the land and the sea. The threat ranges from a hostile aircraft to a hijacked airliner to, increasingly, a swarm of tiny drones…
For most of its history India turned its back on the sea. A run of ‘sea-blindness’ under successive rulers, and a post-independence preoccupation with land threats, left the coast the softest and least-watched of all our frontiers — a neglect that terrorists exposed with devastating effect. Yet the sea is where India’s future economic and…
A nation is defined not only by what lies within it, but by the line where it ends and another begins. That line — walked by soldiers in the snows of Siachen, patrolled by a fisherman-turned-informer off the Gujarat coast, and now watched by radar against a plastic drone humming across a Punjab field at…
India’s Counter-Terrorism Architecture Against a threat this varied, India has built its counter-terrorism response over four decades, largely in reaction to the attacks that exposed each gap. The result is an architecture with four load-bearing walls — a legal backbone, an institutional web, an evolving operational doctrine, and, most recently, a written policy framework —…
Terror Financing Money is the oxygen of terrorism. Recruitment, training, weapons, safe houses, communications, propaganda and the upkeep of families of cadres — every link in the chain has a price, and cutting the money is often more effective than chasing the man with the gun. This is why financial intelligence has moved from the…
Terrorism is the sharpest edge of India’s internal security challenge because it fuses violence, ideology and, very often, the hidden hand of a hostile neighbour into a single instrument. Unlike an insurgency that seeks to hold ground or a criminal syndicate that seeks profit, terrorism trades in fear: it attacks the few to frighten the…
August 2019 and After The single most consequential event in the recent history of Jammu and Kashmir was the constitutional earthquake of August 2019. In one stroke the special status that had defined the state’s relationship with India for seven decades was ended, its very form as a state was dissolved, and the constitutional debate…
Pakistan’s Proxy War At the heart of the Kashmir conflict sits a single, uncomfortable fact: much of what looks like a home-grown uprising is in reality the product of a deliberate, decades-long proxy war waged by the Pakistani state. Having failed to seize the Valley in three open wars, Pakistan concluded that its objective could…
