Opening the Black Box of India’s Internal Security State

Since Independence, the Indian state has grappled with a variety of internal security challenges—insurgencies, terrorist attacks, caste and communal violence, riots, and electoral violence. Their toll has claimed more lives than all of India's five external wars combined.

Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the institutions of the state tasked with managing internal security. How well has India contained violence and preserved order? How have the approaches and capacity of the State evolved to attain these twin objectives?  And what impact does the State's approach have on civil liberties and the quality of democracy?

These are three questions that a new book, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State, takes up. It’s an important new volume co-edited by two of the best-known political scientists working on India—Amit Ahuja of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Devesh Kapur of Johns Hopkins-SAIS.

Amit and Devesh join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss their new book and the lessons it holds for law and order in India. The trio discuss the centralization of internal security powers, the surprising decline in public violence, and the explosion in the size of India’s paramilitary forces. Plus, the three debate whether violence has moved from the periphery of Indian politics to center stage.

1. Soutik Biswas, “Is India seeing a decline in violence?” BBC News, January 16, 2023.
2. Ajai Shukla, “India's tryst with counterinsurgency,” Business Standard, March 15, 2023.
3. Devesh Kapur, “The worrying rise of militarisation in India’s Central Armed Police Forces,” ThePrint, November 29, 2017.
4. Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, “Internal security threats: the 1980s,”Hindustan Times, 2022.