Why India needs an empowered security doctrine
Across the world, liberal democracies are quietly recalibrating.
From Europe’s response to lone-actor attacks to America’s return to preventive surveillance, a cold realization has set in: Yesterday’s security systems cannot handle today’s persistent, asymmetric threats.
India is not an outlier in this reassessment; it is the frontline.
For too long, our internal security debate has oscillated between lofty Western constitutional principles and reactive outrage after attacks.
We lack a clear, operational philosophy that answers one uncomfortable question: What must India do before blood is spilled?
The cult of the ‘safe choice’
India’s problem is not a lack of security laws, but a systemic lack of confidence in using preventive power. Today, the system is designed to punish initiative and reward negligence.
This is not a hypothetical case. It plays out daily.
Imagine a citizen or a police officer noticing suspicious behavior in any public place, be it a crowded marketplace, or a temple – someone making some notes, hand drawn map, etc.
Today, the ‘safest’ choice for the citizen or officer is to do nothing.
If the citizen/ officer interrogates the suspects, she/ he would invite the risk of harassment, media trials, and accusations of profiling.
Acting early carries immense personal risk for the citizen/ officer; acting late, or not at all, carries none.
This was not so till a few decades back.
This is a failure of our policing policy. It is the soil in which national disasters grow.
When the government hesitates to exercise its responsibility in routine situations, it cedes the ground to anti-nationals.
From Parliament to Pahalgam: When policy lagged reality
India’s major attacks, Mumbai in 2008, Pulwama in 2019, and Parliament in 2001, were not failures of intelligence alone. They were failures of policy clarity.
Again and again, warning signals existed. Again and again, action was fragmented, delayed, or legally and politically over-cautious. The state acted decisively only after blood had been spilled.
Pahalgam attack marked a break from this pattern, at least after the attack.
The government’s response, followed by Operation Sindhoor, articulated a long-needed principle: any specific terror attack would be treated as an attack on India itself, not merely as a criminal incident.
This was not an escalation for effect. It was policy honesty. It acknowledged that sustained, externally supported violence against civilians is not crime management; it is a challenge to sovereignty.
But this doctrine cannot remain confined to retaliation. It must reshape everyday internal security governance.
Beyond the binary of crime and terror
Our policy failure stems from a false binary between ‘ordinary policing’ and ‘terror cases’. In reality, the boundary is thin and porous.
Radicalization does not begin with a detonator; terror ecosystems are built brick-by-brick through recruitment, logistics, surveys, and ideological conditioning.
To treat these preparatory stages as unconditional fundamental rights is not liberalism; it is institutional blindness.
A mature security philosophy must empower the officer on the spot to differentiate patterns from incidents.
Whether it is a terror surveyor or a habitual offender, patterns need to be studied.
Preventive authority exists precisely to stop a pattern from becoming a catastrophe.
The great risk transfer
Our Constitution never envisioned rights as a suicide pact.
Reasonable restrictions are not ‘exceptions’ in our democracy; they are the shield that protects it.
The Right to Life belongs to the suspect, yes.
But it belongs equally, if not more, to the commuter on the bus, the family in the market, and the worshipper at the shrine.
When we stretch personal liberty to the point of state paralysis, we are simply transferring the risk from the suspect to the innocent citizen.
A society that prefers procedural perfection over proactive prevention is not morally superior; it is strategically stupid.
The solution: Accountability for inaction
We do not need ‘weaker’ policing; we need clearer authority balanced by serious consequences.
We must move toward a model of ‘Empowered Enforcement’:
- The right to be wrong: Law enforcement must be empowered to disrupt suspicious activity based on behavioral patterns without the fear of criminalization for honest errors of judgment.
- Abuse of investigative authority: Accountability must be swift and severe for proven cases of malicious intent, false implication, fabricated evidence, identity-based targeting, etc.
- Punishing silence: We must hold authorities accountable for inaction. Today, misuse attracts scrutiny, but ignoring warning signals attracts none. That imbalance must end.
Judicial reality vs. liberal rhetoric
E.g., Out of 200 criminal cases, if only 4 have been completed, 3 of which led to conviction, the ‘liberals’ show it as 1.5% conviction, whereas it is 75%. ‘Liberals’ should be fact-checked.
Fast-tracking internal security cases is not executive interference; it is a governance imperative. Justice delayed in these matters is quite literally lives lost, and GDP growth forfeited due to a lack of focus.
Conclusion: From reaction to realism
India doesn’t need to apologize for defending itself. Security philosophies are not universal templates; they must reflect geopolitics and the threats to the specific country.
The choice before us is not between liberty and authority. It is between preventive realism and perpetual fire-fighting.
A confident democracy defines its responsibilities clearly and remembers one non-negotiable truth:
- The first duty of the state is to ensure that its citizens who go out in the morning return home alive in the evening.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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