NEW DELHI -- Fly three hours in just about any direction from New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, and you're likely to land in a zone of either ongoing or recently resolved armed conflict -- Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma for the former, Sri Lanka and Nepal for the latter. What might be surprising, though, is that those odds are not diminished if you travel by road within India. As a result of structural complexities inherent to the Indian state, New Delhi faces internal security challenges that range from terrorism and militant Naxal extremism to insurgencies and proxy wars.
Violence, whether internally or externally driven, is a way of life in India. The 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks along with the spate of bombings across the country would prompt one to believe that terrorism must be at the forefront of people's minds. Yet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently claimed that instead, Naxalism was "the greatest internal security threat" to India. ...