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Subject: Internal Security

  • Need to break Manipur’s cycle of reprisal (Editorial)

    Need to break Manipur’s cycle of reprisal (Editorial)

    Why in the News

    More than three years after the Meitei-Kuki clashes began, Manipur now faces a deepening Kuki-Naga fault line. Four Naga civilians were killed this week in Kuki-dominated Kangpokpi district, an episode that follows the killing of Kuki-Thadou church pastors in May, retaliatory abductions on both sides, and the recovery a month later of the bodies of six Naga men.

    How has the conflict widened beyond the original Meitei-Kuki fault line?

    1. A second, distinct fault line has opened: What began as Meitei-Kuki violence in 2023 has produced a separate Kuki-Naga confrontation, evident in this week’s killing of four Naga civilians in Kangpokpi, a district that sits between Naga-dominated Senapati to the north and Meitei-dominated valley districts to the south.
    2. A traceable chain of retaliation: The killing of Kuki-Thadou pastors in May was followed by retaliatory abductions from both communities, and the subsequent recovery of six Naga men’s bodies a month later, establishing a pattern of reprisal rather than an isolated incident.
    3. Blockades have turned roads into contested territory: Meitei, Kuki and Naga groups have separately imposed blockades that disrupt supplies, raise the cost of food and fuel, and restrict access to healthcare, with Kangpokpi the worst affected due to its position between rival-dominated districts.

    Why has the return of an elected government failed to restore order?

    1. A power-sharing arrangement has not translated into reconciliation: The state government led by Yumnam Khemchand Singh, a Meitei chief minister with deputy chief ministers from the Kuki and Naga communities, returned in February after almost a year of President’s Rule, but has found little success pulling the state back from the brink.
    2. Social segregation has outpaced political representation: The communities remain socially segregated, so political representation across the three groups in government has not by itself addressed the everyday separation that sustains distrust and enables further violence.
    3. Displacement has produced a significant, undercounted toll: Right to Information data has revealed that more than 700 internally displaced people have died in relief camps, a toll separate from and additional to deaths from direct violence.

    Challenges to a political settlement in Manipur

    1. Security forces have struggled to secure supply routes: Security forces have had very little success ensuring the safe movement of convoys carrying essential supplies through blockaded areas. Eg. Blockades imposed by Meitei, Kuki and Naga groups have repeatedly disrupted the movement of food, fuel and medical supplies into Kangpokpi and surrounding districts. Fix. Establish dedicated, jointly monitored humanitarian corridors for essential supplies, with monitoring involving representatives from all three communities rather than security forces alone.
    2. Armed groups remain undisbanded: Militant groups from multiple communities continue to operate, and a crackdown on extremist elements has not kept pace with the scale of continuing violence. Eg. The killing of four Naga civilians in Kangpokpi this week, alongside the earlier killing of Kuki-Thadou pastors, shows armed actors from more than one community remain capable of carrying out attacks. Fix. Pursue simultaneous, verifiable disarmament commitments from armed groups across all three communities rather than sequencing disarmament by community.
    3. No agreed framework exists for resolving land and identity claims: Every claim over land and identity cannot be resolved overnight, and the absence of an interim framework leaves communities without a safe basis for movement, trade or daily coexistence. Eg. The overlapping blockades by all three communities show there is currently no shared understanding of which areas each community can safely access. Fix. Prioritise an interim framework guaranteeing safe movement, trade and access to essential services, deferring final land and identity settlements to a later, dedicated political process.

    Conclusion

    The editorial’s position is that political representation alone, through a Meitei chief minister and Kuki and Naga deputy chief ministers, cannot resolve a conflict sustained by social segregation and repeated cycles of reprisal. It calls for sustained dialogue empowering civil society leaders, an interim framework for safe movement and trade, and simultaneous disarmament and action against extremist elements, alongside the immediate arrest of those responsible for this week’s killings.

    Back2Basics: What is President’s Rule?

    Central takeover of state governance: President’s Rule, imposed under Article 356 of the Constitution, allows the Union government to assume direct control of a state’s administration when its constitutional machinery is deemed to have broken down, as occurred in Manipur for nearly a year before the elected government returned in February.

    1. How social media hooks children — Meta’s $17-billion settlement over addictive design

      Why in the News

      Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties to 47 US states, Washington DC and other territories, and to make binding changes to its products, over claims that it endangered children through addictive design and violated child privacy norms. The settlement follows a March jury verdict in KGM v. Meta et al, where a Los Angeles jury held Meta and Google liable for $6 million in damages after finding that platform features contributed to a young user’s mental health harm. Indian regulators are studying the settlement as a possible template even as the Centre weighs age-based restrictions, usage limits and stronger parental consent requirements for children’s access to social media, discussions that remain at an early stage.

      What has Meta agreed to change, and why does the design focus matter?

      1. A default two-hour daily cap across both apps: Meta will impose a combined two-hour daily limit on Facebook and Instagram for under-18 users, cumulative across multiple accounts, changeable only by a verified parent, with direct messaging excluded.
      2. Time-boxed access at night and during school hours: Teen users will be blocked from most parts of the platforms between midnight and 6 am, with most push notifications disabled between 10 pm and 7 am and muted between 8 am and 3 pm on school weekdays.
      3. Engagement features are curbed by default: The settlement provides a non-personalised feed option, hides like and reaction counts by default, restricts cosmetic-procedure filters, and requires usage prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous scrolling.
      4. Compliance is externally audited: Meta must hire an independent auditor to assess compliance with the safeguards for five years, addressing an issue exposed at the KGM trial, where only 1.1 percent of teen users had activated an existing optional daily-use limit.

      Why do experts see the design-focused approach as more significant than the payout?

      1. The settlement forces architectural change, not just policy change: A US legal academic notes this is the first US instance of a major platform being forced to change the “architecture of its product” rather than only its stated policies, arguing the design changes matter more than the settlement figure.
      2. Default settings determine real-world reach: A researcher at Common Sense Media expects the universal, default time and night-mode limits to have real effect, while the optional recommendation and engagement changes will reach fewer teens because a parent must actively enable them.
      3. Compliance is not the same as harm reduction: A policy scholar cautions that measuring compliance with a feature checklist is different from measuring actual outcomes, and argues independent researchers need real data access on sleep, wellbeing and compulsive-use patterns to know if the changes work.
      4. Recommendation algorithms remain the open question: Critics note the changes do not fully address the recommendation systems that encourage continued scrolling, with one researcher’s biggest unresolved question being how removing algorithmic recommendations changes what teens are shown and re-engage with.

      What evidence links social media design to youth mental health harm?

      1. Large-scale studies link engagement to anxiety and depression: A 2024 meta-analysis of 143 studies involving over one million adolescents found greater social media engagement associated with higher levels of anxiety and depression.
      2. Specific design features have identifiable mechanisms of harm: A Johns Hopkins researcher identifies appearance-based social comparison, visible like counts and overnight notifications as features with clear mechanisms of psychological impact.
      3. Reducing use shows measurable benefit: A 2025 randomised controlled trial of 220 young people found that cutting smartphone-based social media use to about one hour a day for three weeks reduced depression, anxiety and fear of missing out, and improved sleep; a 2026 trial found a similar reduction in loneliness after cutting use by about 78 minutes a day.
      4. Academic performance is also affected: A 2025 systematic review of 34 studies found off-task social media and smartphone use generally associated with lower academic achievement among children and adolescents.

      What does the settlement leave unresolved, and what does it mean for India?

      1. A financial incentive, not a mandate, for industry-wide adoption: About 30 percent of the $17 billion payout is contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting comparable safeguards and matching payments, with stricter limits following only if Snap, TikTok and YouTube all comply.
      2. No admission of wrongdoing or binding precedent: The consent judgment explicitly states the settlement does not establish a standard of care or serve as precedent in any non-participating US state or international jurisdiction, including India.
      3. A legal question on platform liability remains open in the US: A Stanford law professor notes Meta’s attempt to invoke Section 230 immunity against design-based claims could still reach the US Supreme Court, since the settlement does not resolve roughly 2,900 other pending cases.
      4. India’s own discussions remain preliminary: The Centre is weighing age-based restrictions, usage-hour limits and stronger parental consent requirements for children’s social media access, but these discussions are still at an early stage, with the US settlement offered as a possible design-regulation template.

      Back2Basics

      1. Section 230: A provision of the US Communications Decency Act, 1996, that shields online platforms from liability for content posted by users, now being tested against claims that target a platform’s product design rather than the content it hosts.
      2. Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: India’s framework law on personal data processing, which includes provisions requiring verifiable parental consent before processing a child’s personal data.
      3. Multidistrict litigation: A US federal court procedure that consolidates similar lawsuits filed in different districts, such as the roughly 2,900 other cases against social media platforms, for coordinated pre-trial proceedings.

      (GS3-22, 2024, 10 marks, Microtheme: Data Protection) “Describe the context and salient features of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023”

    2. Smart glasses highlight gaps in privacy laws

      Why in the News

      Meta’s smart glasses, which can discreetly record video and audio of anyone around the wearer, have renewed concerns over surveillance and consent, and over how far the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 actually protects a bystander who never agreed to be recorded. The Supreme Court’s nine-judge Bench in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) held privacy to be a fundamental right intrinsic to Article 21, developing a three-part legality-necessity-proportionality test for any restriction on it. Wearable recording devices normalised for everyday use test that framework in a setting the 2017 judgment did not anticipate: a bystander with no relationship to the device’s owner, and no practical way to know they are being recorded.

      Why do smart glasses expose a specific gap in India’s privacy framework?

      1. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is built around consent, which a bystander cannot give: The Act’s core protection mechanism requires a data principal’s consent before personal data is processed, a structure that assumes a data subject who is a party to the transaction, not a bystander recorded without their knowledge by someone else’s device.
      2. No dedicated framework for covert or discreet recording devices: Existing privacy protections address data processing by an identifiable data fiduciary, typically a company or platform, not the diffuse, device-level recording enabled by consumer wearables carried by private individuals.
      3. Enforcement depends on the bystander detecting the recording: Because smart glasses are designed to record discreetly, a bystander has no practical way to exercise any of the rights the 2023 Act grants a data principal, since exercising those rights first requires knowing that one’s data was processed at all.
      4. Cybercrime figures already show a rising surveillance-adjacent harm pattern: National Crime Records Bureau data has recorded a rising trend in cybercrime cases involving unauthorised recording and image-based harassment, a pattern smart-glasses-style wearables are positioned to accelerate.

      Conclusion

      Smart glasses expose a structural gap between a consent-based data protection framework and a recording technology that operates on people who never consented to anything. Closing that gap requires provisions specific to covert or ambient recording devices, rather than relying on the same consent architecture built for data fiduciaries processing information from their own users.

      What is the Right to Privacy, and what does it protect?

      1. About: The Right to Privacy is a fundamental right, read into Article 21’s guarantee of life and personal liberty, protecting an individual’s control over personal information, bodily integrity, and personal decisions from unjustified interference by the State.
      2. Rationale: The right exists because personal autonomy, from choice of partner to control over one’s own data trail, is treated as intrinsic to human dignity rather than a privilege the State may withdraw.
      3. Named typology: The Supreme Court in Puttaswamy (2017) recognised several strands within the right: informational privacy over personal data, decisional autonomy over intimate personal choices, bodily integrity against intrusive procedures, and digital privacy against online surveillance.
      4. Proportionality test for restrictions: Any state action restricting privacy must meet a three-part test: legality (backed by law), a legitimate aim, and proportionality between the means used and the aim pursued.
      5. Institutional gap in independent oversight: Agencies such as the Intelligence Bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing, and the National Investigation Agency operate without a dedicated, independent body reviewing their surveillance activity for privacy compliance.
      6. Colonial-era laws still authorise interception: Provisions in the Telegraph Act continue to authorise phone tapping under standards that predate the Puttaswamy proportionality test, creating a mismatch between old authorisation powers and the newer constitutional standard.
      7. Corporate data harvesting outside individual awareness: Technology platforms collect and monetise personal data at a scale most users do not track or understand, a form of privacy erosion the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 only partially addresses through its consent and purpose-limitation provisions.
      8. Low digital literacy limits the exercise of privacy rights: Citizens frequently do not know what data they have given consent to share, or how to invoke the correction and erasure rights the 2023 Act grants them.

      Challenges in protecting the right to privacy

      1. Mass surveillance without independent judicial oversight: Interception and surveillance decisions in India are authorised through executive processes rather than prior judicial warrant. Eg. Allegations around the use of Pegasus spyware against journalists and activists in 2021 raised exactly this oversight gap. Fix. Introduce a judicial or quasi-judicial warrant requirement before any interception order takes effect, replacing the current executive-only authorisation.
      2. National-security exemptions in the 2023 Act draw criticism: The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 permits government agencies to be exempted from several of its obligations on national security and public-order grounds. Eg. Government bodies notified under the Act’s exemption provisions are not bound by the same data-minimisation and purpose-limitation duties private data fiduciaries face. Fix. Require any national-security exemption to be time-bound and reviewed periodically by an independent oversight body rather than granted as a standing exemption.
      3. Corporate surveillance through data-driven advertising: Large technology platforms build detailed behavioural profiles from data users hand over without meaningfully understanding the trade-off. Eg. Targeted political and commercial advertising built on granular user profiling has drawn regulatory scrutiny in multiple jurisdictions. Fix. Mandate clear, layered consent disclosures under the 2023 Act’s rules that separate necessary data use from optional profiling-based use.
      4. Health data retention concerns from pandemic-era tools: Contact-tracing and health applications built during the COVID-19 pandemic raised unresolved questions about how long the government retains the health data those apps collected. Eg. Aarogya Setu’s data retention and sharing practices drew sustained criticism from privacy researchers. Fix. Set a statutory data-retention ceiling for any health-emergency application, with automatic deletion once the stated public-health purpose ends.
      5. No dedicated authority solely focused on privacy enforcement: The Data Protection Board established under the 2023 Act adjudicates complaints but does not function as a proactive privacy regulator auditing surveillance practices across government and industry. Fix. Expand the Data Protection Board’s mandate to include periodic, unprompted audits of large-scale surveillance and data-processing systems, government and private alike.

      Back2Basics: Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

      1. India’s first standalone law on personal data processing, built around consent as the primary legal basis for processing, with defined exceptions for legitimate uses such as employment and government functions.
      2. Creates the Data Protection Board of India as the adjudicatory body for data-protection complaints and penalties.
      3. Grants data principals rights to access, correct, and erase their personal data, and imposes purpose-limitation and data-minimisation duties on data fiduciaries.
      4. Permits the government to exempt specified agencies from several of the Act’s obligations on national security and public-order grounds, a provision that has drawn criticism for its breadth.

      Matching Previous Year Question

      “[2024, GS3, 10 marks] Describe the context and salient features of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023”

    3. What has fuelled the backlash against Flock cameras in the U.S.?

      Why in the News

      A backlash has grown in the United States against Flock Safety, a company supplying Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras, after reports that local police departments used the company’s camera network for purposes beyond its stated public-safety mandate, including tracking individuals without a warrant. Flock’s cameras were adopted by thousands of US municipalities on the promise of solving vehicle-related crime through license-plate matching. Evidence that police departments used the same network for broader surveillance, including in ways that reached beyond a single jurisdiction’s own authority, has turned a crime-fighting tool into a symbol of unchecked surveillance expansion.

      Why has Flock Safety specifically drawn this backlash?

      1. Scale of camera deployment across US municipalities: Flock Safety’s automated license-plate-reader cameras are installed across thousands of towns and cities in the United States, giving the company’s network a national footprint that few individual police departments could have built on their own.
      2. Cross-jurisdiction data sharing without matching oversight: Police departments using Flock’s network can search license-plate data captured by cameras in other jurisdictions, a capability that expands what a single local force can track well beyond its own legal boundary, without matching cross-jurisdiction oversight.
      3. Reported misuse beyond stated crime-fighting purpose: Instances have emerged of the camera network being used to track individuals in contexts such as reproductive-healthcare-related travel and immigration enforcement, uses that go well beyond the vehicle-theft and hit-and-run cases the system was marketed to solve.
      4. Absence of a federal framework governing ALPR use: The United States has no single federal law governing how automated license-plate-reader data can be collected, retained, or shared, leaving oversight to a patchwork of local ordinances and police department policy.

      What does this suggest for India’s own camera-based surveillance rollout?

      1. India is expanding AI-linked camera surveillance in parallel: Indian cities have been expanding networks of AI-enabled cameras for traffic and law-enforcement purposes, a rollout that mirrors the scale-up Flock’s network underwent in the United States before the current backlash.
      2. India’s privacy law does not yet address law-enforcement camera data specifically: The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs personal data processing generally but does not set out a dedicated framework for retention limits, access logging, or cross-agency sharing of camera surveillance data collected for law enforcement.
      3. The US backlash offers a design lesson before scale, not after: The concern in the United States surfaced only after the network had scaled to thousands of jurisdictions with data-sharing already built into the product, a sequencing that leaves oversight design catching up to deployment rather than preceding it.

      Conclusion

      The backlash against Flock Safety’s cameras in the United States is a warning about what happens when a surveillance network scales faster than the oversight framework governing its use. India’s own camera-based surveillance expansion is at an earlier stage, leaving room to build retention, access, and sharing safeguards into the framework before, rather than after, the network reaches a comparable scale.

      Back2Basics: Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR)

      1. A camera system that automatically captures and reads vehicle license plates, converting the image into searchable text data matched against watchlists or databases.
      2. Originally marketed for narrow uses such as locating stolen vehicles or vehicles linked to an active crime.
      3. Data captured by one camera can be pooled into a shared network, allowing a search across cameras operated by multiple, unconnected police jurisdictions.
      4. Raises retention and access-control questions distinct from a single fixed CCTV camera, because the data is structured, searchable, and easily aggregated across locations.

      Matching Previous Year Question

      “[2024, GS3, 10 marks] Describe the context and salient features of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023”

    4. AI is transforming cyber attacks as well as defences: What this means for India

      AI is transforming cyber attacks as well as defences: What this means for India

      Why in the News

      Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now amplifying cyber threats across the cyber kill chain at speed, scale and sophistication, and is developing the ability to act as an autonomous agent that identifies, plans, adapts and carries out offensive cyber operations. The shift follows the fastest technology adoption on record: the Internet took 15 years to reach a billion users, and ChatGPT did so in three. The tension is that AI capability is concentrated in very few countries, so the same technology that raises the threat also determines who can defend against it. India’s indigenous AI ecosystem lags the United States and China across the entire AI stack, leaving it exposed on both sides of that equation.

      What is the cyber kill chain?

      1. Definition: The cyber kill chain is the sequence of stages an attacker must complete to succeed, running from reconnaissance on a target, through weaponisation of malicious code, to command and control of the compromised system.
      2. Why the framework matters: Defence has traditionally worked by breaking any one link in that chain, since an attack that fails at one stage cannot proceed to the next.
      3. What AI changes: AI is now compressing or automating several stages at once, so breaking a single link no longer stops the sequence.

      How is AI amplifying offensive cyber operations?

      1. Reconnaissance is automated: Gathering information about a target once depended on humans, and research shows ChatGPT models being used to mine social media for precise details to craft AI generated phishing emails.
      2. Deepfakes are now real time: AI is generating real time deepfakes, deepening confusion about what is authentic online.
      3. Social engineering scales: AI enabled social engineering, the use of AI to trick or persuade people into taking harmful actions, no longer requires a human operator per target.
      4. Malware no longer holds a fixed shape: Large language models (LLMs) can autonomously generate, modify and restructure polymorphic malware to suit the situation, unlike traditional malware, which relies on fixed signatures and predictable patterns.
      5. An AI has already run an attack chain: In September 2025 Anthropic claimed a Chinese state sponsored group, GTG-1002, had used Claude Code as an autonomous cyber agent across multiple stages of an attack, in what the company called the first reported case of an AI orchestrated cyber espionage campaign.

      Why does autonomous vulnerability discovery change the risk?

      1. Zero-days are being found at scale: Anthropic’s latest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, has identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities, meaning flaws previously unknown to developers, across major operating systems and browsers, many of them critical.
      2. It builds the exploits too: The model developed related exploits largely without human intervention, collapsing the gap between finding a flaw and being able to use it.
      3. Hardened systems are not exempt: It found a 27 year old vulnerability in OpenBSD, an operating system reputed to be highly security hardened and widely used to run firewalls and critical infrastructure.
      4. Industrial systems are the exposed surface: Such vulnerabilities are especially dangerous for Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS), the computing that governs nuclear facilities, energy grids, pharmaceutical manufacturing, chemical processing, oil refineries and communication networks.
      5. Exposure grows with integration: That infrastructure becomes more exposed as it integrates further with AI, so the adoption that improves efficiency also widens the attack surface.

      Why do old cyber defences no longer hold?

      1. Signature matching fails against shape shifting code: Traditional antivirus looks for known malware fingerprints, which malware that constantly changes and adapts no longer presents.
      2. Static patching is too slow: Security patches written for known vulnerabilities are far less effective when new flaws are discovered and weaponised faster than patch cycles run.
      3. AI defence works differently: AI in cybersecurity enables real time threat detection, automated response and large scale data analysis, mitigating risks faster than human led triage.
      4. The divide has shifted: The real AI divide is not about who uses AI but about who builds it and who controls its development, which is why cybersecurity capability now tracks AI capability.

      How exposed is India?

      1. A nuclear plant’s data was posted: The ransomware group World Leaks claimed to have stolen and posted data related to India’s largest nuclear plant, Kudankulam, including blueprints of facility parts and supplier details.
      2. The ranking moved sharply: Cyber intelligence firm CloudSEK’s 2024 report placed India as the second most cyber attacked nation after the United States, and its 2025 report placed India sixth.
      3. State backed actors targeted defence during a conflict: During Operation Sindoor, Pakistan backed threat actors such as APT36 targeted India’s critical sectors, including the Ministry of Defence, the Army, the Navy and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
      4. A new target class appeared: The same campaign targeted Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) Linux for the first time, extending the attack surface to India’s indigenous operating system.

      Can India defend a cyberspace built on an AI stack it does not own?

      1. The ecosystem is incremental: India’s indigenous AI ecosystem remains incremental and lags well behind the United States and China across the AI stack.
      2. The gap is at every layer: The shortfall runs across foundational models, graphics processing units, chip design and large scale data centre infrastructure, so no single procurement closes it.
      3. Dependence is the security problem: The lag leaves India heavily dependent on the United States and other technologically advanced countries for the very tools its defence now requires.
      4. Capability determines both roles: Countries with leading AI ecosystems gain a greater ability both to conduct sophisticated cyber campaigns and to defend against them, so dependence caps India’s ceiling on defence as well as deterrence.

      What has India done so far?

      1. CERT-In has shifted its methods: The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the national agency for responding to cyber security incidents, has since 2025 adopted AI driven threat detection, cyber resilience measures, trusted AI frameworks and citizen centric malware mitigation.
      2. A specific advisory was issued: In April 2026 it issued an advisory for organisations on defending against AI driven cyber risks.
      3. The advisory’s operative instructions: Recommendations included “removing unnecessary internet-facing services” and treating every newly discovered vulnerability as something that “could be exploited within hours, not weeks”.
      4. Governance work is at the framework stage: The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is exploring a consent based framework for synthetically generated content, alongside curbs on agentic AI autonomy and clearer liability frameworks for AI models.

      Challenges to India’s AI-enabled cyber defence

      1. Defence rests on advisories rather than obligations: CERT-In’s guidance to organisations is recommendatory, so a private operator of critical infrastructure faces no penalty for ignoring it. Eg. The April 2026 advisory asked organisations to remove unnecessary internet facing services, with no compliance audit attached. Fix. Convert the advisory content into mandatory, audited security baselines for power, banking, telecom and healthcare operators under the Information Technology Act, 2000.
      2. Compute dependence caps defensive AI: Running real time detection models at national scale needs domestic graphics processing unit capacity that India does not have. Eg. India’s shortfall spans foundational models, chip design and large scale data centre infrastructure alike. Fix. Prioritise sovereign compute for security workloads specifically, reserving a share of publicly funded AI infrastructure for CERT-In and sector CSIRTs.
      3. Attribution is harder when the attacker is an agent: An AI orchestrated campaign leaves a machine’s traces rather than an operator’s, which weakens the evidentiary basis for a state response. Eg. The GTG-1002 campaign was identified by the model provider, not by a victim’s own forensics. Fix. Mandate model providers serving Indian users to report detected misuse of their systems for offensive operations, on the six hour breach reporting model already in force.
      4. Legacy industrial systems cannot be patched quickly: Control systems in refineries and grids run on decade old software where a patch requires a plant shutdown. Eg. A 27 year old OpenBSD flaw survived in software widely used to run firewalls and critical infrastructure. Fix. Require network segmentation and one way data diodes between industrial control networks and corporate networks, so an unpatched system is not internet reachable.
      5. The skills base is thin at the state level: Cyber investigation and forensics capacity is concentrated in central agencies, while most first response happens at state police stations. Eg. Citizen fraud complaints route through the national helpline before reaching local police with the capacity to act. Fix. Establish State Computer Emergency Response Teams and cyber forensic laboratories with dedicated cyber police training academies in every State.

      Conclusion

      AI has moved cyber conflict from a contest between attackers and defenders to a contest between countries that build AI and countries that buy it. India sits on the wrong side of that line while carrying one of the world’s largest attack volumes, from a ransomware posting of Kudankulam plant data to state backed targeting of its defence establishment. India cannot build the AI stack quickly, so the immediate requirement is that AI and cybersecurity stop being treated in silos and are handled as interconnected strands of policymaking: AI for cyber defence, and cybersecurity for AI.

      “[2022, GS3, 10 marks] What are the different elements of cyber security? Keeping in view the challenges in cyber security, examine the extent to which India has successfully developed a comprehensive National Cyber Security Strategy.”

    5. Remembering Niketu Iralu: Peace activist, bridge between Nagas, mainland India

      Remembering Niketu Iralu: Peace activist, bridge between Nagas, mainland India

      Why in the News

      Niketu Iralu, a Naga peace activist, died in a Delhi hospital on 18 August 2026 at the age of 91. He spent six decades on reconciliation between Naga factions and between the Naga people and the rest of India, outside every formal negotiating channel. His maternal uncle, Angami Zapu Phizo, led the Naga National Council (NNC), which declared Naga independence on 14 August 1947. The Centre constituted a new ministerial panel last week to carry forward the stalled talks on a final Naga settlement. The conflict has found no solution in the nearly eight decades since that declaration. One position holds that a final text can now be signed. The competing position is that the reconciliation work behind six decades of talks has no institutional successor.

      What is the Naga peace process?

      1. A ceasefire came before any accord: A peace camp at Chedema, on a hilltop near Kohima, negotiated a ceasefire in 1964 between the rebel Naga Federal Government and the Government of India. It was the first suspension of hostilities after more than a decade of armed insurgency.
      2. The Shillong Accord split the movement: NNC representatives signed the Shillong Accord in 1975, accepting the Constitution of India. A faction rejected it and formed the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) in 1980.
      3. The current track opened with the 1997 ceasefire: The Centre signed a ceasefire with the NSCN (Isak-Muivah) faction in 1997. Talks under it have run for close to three decades without a final agreement.
      4. The Framework Agreement fixed the terms in 2015: The Centre and the NSCN (Isak-Muivah) signed a Framework Agreement on 3 August 2015 recognising the “unique history” of the Nagas. Its contents have never been published.

      Why did a family at the centre of the sovereignty claim produce its leading peace advocate?

      1. The lineage ran through the sovereignty movement: His father, Sevilie Iralu, was among the first Naga doctors. His maternal uncle led the council that made the 1947 declaration.
      2. He chose a different method: He committed himself to non-violence, dialogue and reconciliation rather than armed struggle. He became known across the Northeast as a peace activist rather than a political negotiator.
      3. Initiatives of Change shaped that method: He worked in Initiatives of Change, an organisation that pursues social transformation through “personal change”. Its premise is that a political conflict is resolved by first changing the people inside it.
      4. Mainland India was a discovery, not an inheritance: He left for Madras Christian College in the 1950s, his first encounter with mainland India. He described the crowds boarding trains at Kolkata as a scale of population that felt unsurvivable.
      5. His house was named for the method: His home at Sechu Zubza in Kohima district was called Kerunyu Ki, “The House of Listening”. People travelled to it for counsel rather than to a party office or a negotiating table.
      6. Recognition came as a bridge builder: He received the Bhupen Hazarika Integration Award among other honours. Hundreds gathered at Dimapur airport when his body arrived from Delhi.

      How does the Second World War figure in Naga political memory?

      1. The war reached Naga villages: The Japanese Army invaded Nagaland in 1944 during the Second World War. His village, Khonoma, was overrun and families fled into the forest.
      2. The battle of Kohima was the turning point: The Japanese retreated after the battle of Kohima. An advance past it would have taken them to the Brahmaputra valley and into mainland India.
      3. The cemetery fixed the memory: The Kohima War Cemetery carries the epitaph, “When you go home, tell them of us and say, for their tomorrow, we gave our today.”
      4. The war left a habit of seeing the enemy as human: His sister slapped a Japanese soldier helping himself to a Naga shawl, and the soldier bowed and left. He read that restraint as evidence that the soldier also had a sister at home.

      What did the 1990 repatriation of Phizo’s body show about informal mediation?

      1. The leader died in exile: Angami Zapu Phizo died in London in April 1990. He had been in exile since 1960, when he left for the United Kingdom to mobilise world opinion for the Naga cause.
      2. The request came from the insurgent side: NNC leaders asked him to help bring the body back to India. No working channel existed between the NNC and the Government of India at that point.
      3. The government feared a funeral would trigger violence: The Janata Dal led government judged that returning the body might set off violence in Nagaland. A Janata Dal member of the Rajya Sabha, who had worked with him in Initiatives of Change for three decades, argued that denying the Nagas the right to grieve was the greater risk.
      4. The ask was procedural, not financial: He told the then Finance Minister at a 5 a.m. meeting that the Nagas had collected the money themselves. He asked only for foreign exchange clearance.
      5. The state supplied the logistics: The remains were received at the technical area of Palam airport. A Home Ministry aircraft then carried the casket to Kohima for the funeral.

      Does reconciliation require a community to confront its own failures?

      1. The demand was turned inward, not outward: A tribute in Ukhrul Times described him as a man who spent decades asking Nagas to confront their failures, resist hatred and recover the courage to listen. The demand was addressed to Naga society, not to the Indian state.
      2. Moral courage was defined as internal criticism: He held that moral courage involves “telling one’s own side what it does not want to hear”. He did not treat reconciliation as a concession or as weakness.
      3. Factional politics penalises exactly that: Naga groups have fought each other as often as they have fought the state, and internal criticism reads as disloyalty inside a faction. Eg. The NSCN split of 1988 into the Isak-Muivah and Khaplang factions produced years of inter-factional killing.
      4. The obstacle is not an administrative clause: The unresolved items are a separate Naga flag and a separate Naga constitution, which are claims about identity rather than about administration. A negotiator can concede an administrative arrangement, and only the community can revise a claim about who it is.

      Challenges to the Naga peace settlement

      1. The flag and constitution demand is unresolved: The NSCN (Isak-Muivah) insists on a separate Naga flag and a separate constitution, the Yehzabo, rejected by the Centre as incompatible with Indian sovereignty. Eg. The talks declared concluded in October 2019 ended without agreement on either demand. Fix. Settle the symbolic claim as a cultural flag protected under Article 371A’s guarantee for Naga customary practice, separated from any constitutional status.
      2. The territorial claim crosses three other States: The “Greater Nagalim” demand would merge Naga inhabited areas of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh into one unit. Eg. The Manipur Assembly has repeatedly resolved against any settlement altering the State’s boundaries. Fix. Use non-territorial autonomy, giving Naga councils outside Nagaland cultural and development powers without redrawing State boundaries.
      3. The negotiation has two competing counterparties: The Centre talks in parallel to the NSCN (Isak-Muivah) and to the Naga National Political Groups, and each rejects a settlement signed only with the other. Eg. The Working Committee of the Naga National Political Groups signed a separate Agreed Position in 2017. Fix. Convene one joint negotiating forum so a single signed text binds every group.
      4. Ceasefire ground rules are routinely breached: Cadres under ceasefire run parallel taxation in Nagaland and in Naga areas of Manipur, which keeps an armed economy alive through the negotiation. Eg. Traders and salaried employees in Dimapur pay levies to more than one faction. Fix. Publish the ceasefire monitoring group’s findings with a fixed penalty schedule for each verified breach.
      5. A text kept secret cannot be ratified: The 2015 Framework Agreement has never been published, so no legislature or public body has examined what was agreed. Eg. Nagaland’s own legislators have sought disclosure of the text on the floor of the Assembly. Fix. Table the agreed text in Parliament and in the Nagaland Assembly before signature, so ratification precedes implementation.
      6. Security law feeds the grievance the talks address: The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 remains in force across parts of Nagaland, sustaining the alienation a settlement is meant to end. Eg. The Oting killings of December 2021 in Mon district led the Assembly to demand repeal. Fix. Complete the district by district withdrawal already begun and move residual powers to a civil authority subject to judicial review.

      Conclusion

      The Naga settlement is stalled on claims about identity, not on administrative detail, and identity claims are revised by a community rather than conceded by a negotiator. The reconciliation work that kept six decades of talks survivable was carried by individuals with no official standing, and it has no institutional successor. A ministerial panel can reopen the file. It cannot by itself rebuild the trust that would let a signed text hold.

      “[2025, GS3, 15 marks] What are the major challenges to internal security and peace process in the North-Eastern States? Map the various peace accords and agreements initiated by the government in the past decade.”

    6. Dimagi Naxal frames the mind as a security question

      Why in the News

      The Prime Minister’s Independence Day address named the dimagi Naxal, the intellectual Naxal, as a target of the state’s response to Left Wing Extremism (LWE). The address is defended as doing what Indian political discourse had avoided for four decades. The war against Naxalism had been measured in body counts, arms recoveries and district maps turning from red to green, and the architecture of ideas behind the insurgency was rarely confronted. The claim now advanced is that naming the ideological network forces a final battle on the deadliest terror threat to have plagued India. What that opens is a contest over whether a state can move against an ideology without moving against protected speech.

      What does the term dimagi Naxal name?

      1. The ideological support network rather than the armed cadre: The term identifies those who supply the intellectual and organisational scaffolding of the insurgency instead of carrying weapons for it.
      2. Why the coinage matters: Naming that layer shifts the counter insurgency target from territory held to ideas circulated, which no previous formulation did.
      3. Where it was used: The formulation was made from the Red Fort on Independence Day, which places it in the government’s highest profile annual statement of priorities.

      Why does the argument treat Naxalism as an ideology before a militia?

      1. The founding case: Naxalism was always an ideology before it was a militia, and the ideologue of Naxalbari theorised, organised and incited others towards armed revolution rather than acting out of personal deprivation.
      2. The social origin of the leadership: Naxal leadership across generations has been drawn from comfortable, often landed or urban intellectual backgrounds.
      3. The stated political objective: Naxals seek to overthrow the Republic of India along with its bourgeois constitution and to establish a communist state. That state is to liquidate class enemies by armed revolution.
      4. The view of the Indian state itself: Underground cadre, overground members and sympathisers hold that India is an artificial and illegitimate entity denying the right of self determination to different nationalities and working at the behest of international capital.

      What did the shift to urban expansion after 2009 change?

      1. The decision and its trigger: After Operation Green Hunt in 2009, Maoists decided to expand aggressively in urban centres and to hide in plain sight.
      2. The cover adopted: Cadre positioned themselves as human rights activists, university professors, journalists and even corporate employees.
      3. The functions assigned: The stated aims are to act as couriers, to provide safe houses for cadres of banned outfits, to stall action against terror groups, to wage an ideological war on the Indian state and to promote anarchy.
      4. The vocabulary used: Propaganda is packaged in acceptable terminology such as human rights, Dalit assertion, farmer issues and individual rights, with the ostensible aim of justice for the marginalised.
      5. What is not stated publicly: The theoretical framework behind that vocabulary associates freedom from hunger and poverty with the balkanisation of India, which makes it a messianic cult in the form of a secular ideology.

      Why did the ecosystem’s attack shift to development itself?

      1. The doctrine that worked: The government’s counter Naxal doctrine has rested on a triad of security, rehabilitation and development.
      2. The response it provoked: Because the doctrine worked on the ground, the Naxal intellectual ecosystem shifted its attack to development itself.
      3. What is now opposed: Nuclear power projects, agricultural modernisation programmes and infrastructure corridors have been opposed by a recurring cast of civil society groups.
      4. The stated basis of the objection: The objection advanced is not a specific local grievance or a flaw in the project but the writ of the Indian state in that territory.

      What does the movement’s own history suggest about resurgence?

      1. The first wave and its collapse: The first wave of Naxalism was crushed by the mid 1970s.
      2. The interval before its return: It resurfaced two decades later, which shows that suppression of the armed layer alone does not settle the question.
      3. The peak of the second wave: By the mid 2000s nearly a third of the country’s territory lay in the Red Corridor.

      How has the mode of ideological transmission changed?

      1. The old method: Ideologues had to organise physically, travel to villages, print pamphlets and hold clandestine meetings.
      2. The new method: Their successors use smartphones and build a following on Instagram, YouTube and X by monetising a persona built around resistance.
      3. What has and has not changed: The medium has changed and the incitement is more diffuse, and the function is unchanged, which is manufacturing moral cover for anti state violence and instability.
      4. Why participation has widened: Others join for the allure of resistance as a cultural posture or for the profit that anti establishment content generates, without following where the argument leads.

      Can the state contest an ideology without policing lawful dissent?

      1. The stake as the argument puts it: If the Naxals succeed there will be no freedom or liberty, no police but a party militia, no rule of law or courts but kangaroo courts, and intellectuals and professors sent to labour camps.
      2. Why bluntness is defended: People must know what the ideology stands for and the consequences that follow if it prevails.
      3. The asymmetry that closes the argument: A government can be voted out at the next election, and a state that collapses cannot be voted back.
      4. The unresolved edge: The categories the formulation names are professors, journalists and activists, so the test of the doctrine is whether it distinguishes material support for a banned organisation from lawful advocacy that the state finds inconvenient.

      Challenges to the counter Naxal doctrine

      1. A security vacuum follows the withdrawal of central forces: Handing territory back to thin State police forces creates gaps that splinter groups and criminal networks occupy. Eg. Areas cleared in earlier operations in the 1970s were reoccupied two decades later. Fix. Convert forward operating bases into permanent State police stations with local recruitment before central armed police forces are drawn down.
      2. Former cadre turn to organised crime: An insurgency deprived of ideology retains its weapons, terrain knowledge and extortion networks. Eg. Maoist financing in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh already ran on levies from contractors and transporters. Fix. Tie surrender and rehabilitation payments to verified livelihood placement over several years rather than to a one time cash grant.
      3. Absentee administration in the cleared districts: Security gains do not hold where teachers, doctors and revenue officials do not report to their posted stations. Eg. Interior blocks of Bastar have run on deputation and vacancy for years. Fix. Pay a hardship differential and fix minimum tenure norms so that posting to an interior block is a career step rather than a punishment.
      4. Rejected forest rights claims reopen the original grievance: Land alienation is the grievance the insurgency was built on, and the statutory remedy is under used. Eg. Community Forest Rights claims face high rejection rates in the same districts that were worst affected. Fix. Audit rejected claims at the district level under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 and record reasons for each rejection in writing.
      5. Peace attracts the extraction that caused the conflict: A district declared safe becomes available for mining and industrial investment, which brings displacement back. Eg. Iron ore and bauxite belts overlap almost exactly with the former Red Corridor. Fix. Require Gram Sabha consent under the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 and transparent use of District Mineral Foundation funds before new leases are cleared.
      6. Prosecuting the overground network is evidentially hard: Cases built on association rather than on an act collapse in court and produce long undertrial detention in the interim. Eg. Several urban prosecutions under anti terror law have run for years without trial beginning. Fix. Require sanctioning authorities to record specific evidence of material support before charges are framed, and impose statutory timelines on trial commencement.

      Conclusion

      The formulation moves counter insurgency from a territorial contest to a contest over ideas, at the point where the armed movement has been declared defeated and its support network has not. The government’s own record shows that suppression of the armed layer without settling the grievance produced a second wave two decades later, which is the case for confronting the ideology rather than only the militia. What remains unresolved is the line between the material support network the state may lawfully dismantle and the criticism a democracy is obliged to tolerate, and that line will be drawn by courts rather than by speeches.

      “[2025, GS3, 10 marks] The Government of India recently stated that Left Wing Extremism (LWE) will be eliminated by 2026. What do you understand by LWE and how are the people affected by it? What measures have been taken by the government to eliminate LWE?”

    7. Saving faces: Use of facial recognition equipment at protest site is worrisome

      Why in the News

      The Delhi Police has told the Supreme Court that it deployed a facial recognition system at the site of the Cockroach Janta Party protests, along with a mobile surveillance van, a command and control vehicle, smart spectacles and drones. The disclosure came in the same proceeding. In that proceeding the force has continued to deny using excessive force or manhandling demonstrators, contrary to the protestors’ own testimonies. India is therefore normalising the technical ability to subject political gatherings to searchable biometric surveillance. Legislation and judicial oversight have not yet settled when the state may lawfully do so. The contest is between a policing capability that is already operational and a legal framework that names no threshold, no authorising authority and no retention rule for its use.

      What is a facial recognition system?

      1. It converts a face into a searchable record: The system extracts measurable geometric features from a face image and stores them as a numeric template that can be matched against other templates.
      2. Two distinct operations, two different risk profiles: Verification matches one face against one claimed identity. Identification matches one face against an entire database, and only the second turns a crowd into a search.
      3. Real time capture removes the choice to participate anonymously: Cameras enabled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) scan faces as people move and run matches against a database without any interaction with the person scanned.

      What surveillance equipment did the police say it had deployed?

      1. A facial recognition system with AI enabled cameras: These scanned faces in real time against a database. The demonstration was under way at the time.
      2. A mobile surveillance van: A vehicle mounted capture platform able to move with the crowd rather than covering a fixed field.
      3. A command and control vehicle: The on site node where feeds from the various capture devices were aggregated and acted on.
      4. Smart spectacles: Wearable devices used to identify individuals on the move, which extends identification beyond fixed and vehicle mounted cameras.
      5. Drones and videographers: Aerial and handheld recording covering the site from angles the ground cameras did not reach.
      6. Private contractors hold two of these systems: The van and the spectacles have been tied to private contractors on terms that have never been disclosed, so a commercial entity sits inside the capture chain on an unknown mandate.

      What did the police not disclose?

      1. Whether every face in range was processed: The force has not addressed whether actual biometric processing occurred for every individual within the range of the cameras, which is the difference between targeted identification and mass capture.
      2. Where discarded images went: Images from checks that produced no match were open to copying in the interim, and the force has not said whether any copy survives.

      Which laws currently govern facial recognition, and what do they leave open?

      1. No statute governs the technology: There is no law in force that regulates the use of facial recognition systems by the state, so deployment rests on executive decision alone.
      2. The data protection law is not yet operative on this point: The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, whose data processing obligations are not yet in force, still makes broad exemptions for state agencies.
      3. The existing police database is purpose limited: The Automated Facial Recognition System of the National Crime Records Bureau is meant for identifying criminals and unidentified bodies, not for scanning an assembly.
      4. The 2022 statute widened records, not subjects: The Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 expanded the set of records the police may collect, but only from specified persons rather than from the public at large.
      5. The gap is the crowd: Every one of these instruments operates against identified groups of people, and none of them authorises indiscriminate capture of everyone present at a location.

      Can mass biometric capture at a protest survive the proportionality test?

      1. The state carries the burden: Interference with the right to privacy must clear a well established proportionality test, and the burden of establishing each limb sits on the state.
      2. The first limb already fails on the facts: The existence of a legitimate objective is hard to establish for facial recognition used en masse, because the technology is indiscriminate at the point of capture and cannot be aimed at a suspect.
      3. A less restrictive alternative exists: Conventional policing achieves the same objective of maintaining order and identifying offenders without capturing the biometrics of every person present.
      4. Constitutional validity is not the only test: Even leaving aside the constitutionality of the police action, a capability deployed without a governing standard sets the precedent for the next deployment.

      How does biometric surveillance affect the right to protest?

      1. The deterrent operates before any legal restriction: The chilling effect on potential participants curtails the right to protest without any order prohibiting the protest.
      2. Anonymity is part of the freedom: Assembly has historically carried the assurance that presence in a crowd is not the same as being recorded as an individual participant.
      3. The cost falls on people with the most to lose: Government employees, students facing institutional discipline and people in precarious work self select out once presence becomes a permanent identified record.
      4. The chill is unfalsifiable: Nobody counts the people who stayed home, so the harm never appears in the record a court would examine.

      What remains unanswered before this use can be justified?

      1. The access controls: It is unknown which officers, agencies or contractor personnel could query the captured images and against which databases.
      2. The authorising legal provisions: The provisions relied on to authorise the major decisions, including the decision to scan an entire assembly, have not been identified.
      3. The false positive rate: The expected error rate of the system has not been stated, and a false match at a protest site produces detention of an innocent person on machine evidence.

      Challenges to the regulation of facial recognition technology in India

      1. Deployment has run far ahead of legislation: State and city police forces have procured systems under general policing powers rather than under any enabling statute. Eg. Several State police departments and airports adopted facial recognition without a dedicated legal framework in place. Fix. Enact a facial recognition statute prescribing permitted purposes, a judicial or independent authorisation requirement, and a fixed retention period.
      2. The data protection statute exempts the principal user: Broad exemptions for state agencies mean the very actor conducting mass capture falls outside the consent and purpose limitation architecture. Eg. The Justice B N Srikrishna Committee had recommended narrow and specified exemptions rather than open ended ones on grounds of sovereignty and public order. Fix. Replace the blanket agency exemption with a case by case exemption that must be notified with reasons and laid before Parliament.
      3. Accuracy is unequal across populations: Error rates for facial recognition are consistently higher for darker skinned faces, women and younger subjects, so the burden of false matches is not evenly distributed. Eg. Independent testing of commercial systems has repeatedly found the highest error rates for darker skinned women. Fix. Mandate published accuracy testing disaggregated by skin tone, sex and age before any system is procured for policing use.
      4. Private contractors sit inside the state’s capture chain: Outsourcing capture hardware and processing places biometric data with entities that are not accountable through public law remedies. Eg. Police facial recognition deployments in several States run on vendor supplied platforms whose procurement contracts are not in the public domain. Fix. Require every surveillance procurement contract to be published with its data handling clauses, and make the contractor a joint respondent in any privacy proceeding.
      5. There is no oversight body with jurisdiction: No standing authority audits police biometric systems, so no institution can verify retention, deletion or match logs after the event. Eg. Agencies conducting interception under existing law are reviewed only by an internal executive review committee. Fix. Establish a statutory surveillance oversight commission with power to inspect match logs and order deletion.
      6. Function creep is the default trajectory: A database built for one purpose is progressively opened to others once the infrastructure exists. Eg. Facial recognition adopted for airport boarding convenience has been proposed for wider identity verification uses. Fix. Write a statutory bar on cross purpose querying, with each authorised purpose requiring a separate legislative amendment.

      Conclusion

      The disclosure establishes that the capability to convert a political gathering into a searchable biometric record is already deployed, contracted out in part, and operating without a statute that says when it may be used. The proportionality test, on the facts available, is not close: the technology captures indiscriminately, a less restrictive alternative exists, and the state has not identified the provision that authorised the decision. Until Parliament enacts a facial recognition law with a stated purpose, an authorising authority, a retention limit and published accuracy standards, each deployment simply widens the precedent for the next one.

      “[2024, GS3, 10 marks] Describe the context and salient features of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023″

    8. CRPF forms core group to review self-harm cases after a spate of suicides

      Why in the News

      The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has constituted a high level core group to conduct monthly reviews of self harm cases among its personnel. Deaths by suicide in the force touched a five year high of 59 in 2025, which moves the response from unit level handling of individual incidents to a standing headquarters mechanism.

      What is the Central Reserve Police Force?

      1. Mandate: The Central Reserve Police Force is the Union’s principal internal security force, deployed on requisition to States for counter insurgency, anti Left Wing Extremism operations, law and order duty and election security.
      2. Command: It functions under the Ministry of Home Affairs and is headed by a Director General, with operations organised through executive battalions and specialised wings.
      3. Scale: It is the largest of the Central Armed Police Forces, with a sanctioned strength above three lakh personnel spread across every State and Union Territory.

      What do the suicide figures in the force since 2021 show?

      1. Five year peak in 2025: Fifty nine CRPF personnel died by suicide in 2025, the highest figure in the five year series and the trigger for the present review mechanism.
      2. The full series: The force recorded 57 such deaths in 2021, 43 in 2022, 57 in 2023, 46 in 2024 and 59 in 2025.
      3. The current year: Nineteen such deaths were reported till 30 May 2026.
      4. No downward trend: The numbers oscillate within a narrow band rather than falling, which indicates that existing unit level welfare measures have not shifted the underlying pattern.
      5. Deaths on duty: The figures from 2021 to May 2026 show that several of these deaths took place while the personnel were on duty, not while on leave or at home.

      Why has a headquarters level core group been created rather than leaving reviews to individual units?

      1. A structured mechanism: Senior officers at a meeting in the CRPF headquarters earlier this month identified the absence of a structured mechanism to examine such incidents as the gap to be closed.
      2. Recurring risk factors: A unit examining a single death cannot detect a factor that repeats across battalions, so pattern identification requires a body sitting above the unit.
      3. Command level ownership: The core group is headed by the Director General of the force, which places accountability for prevention at the apex of the command chain rather than with the battalion commandant.
      4. Fixed periodicity: The group is to meet every month, converting review from an event triggered by a death into a standing calendar obligation.
      5. Four review heads: Each monthly meeting is to cover the self harm incidents reported, the causes and circumstances behind them, the availability and use of welfare or psychological support, and the preventive steps taken by the unit concerned.

      What drives self harm among central armed police force personnel?

      1. Prolonged separation from family: Personnel serve long tenures in field formations away from their home States, with leave frequently curtailed during active operations.
      2. Operational stress in insurgency theatres: Extended deployment in Left Wing Extremism affected districts and in Jammu and Kashmir combines physical risk with an absence of privacy and rest.
      3. Domestic and financial distress: Land disputes, family illness and debt at the home station cannot be attended to from a field posting, and the inability to act is itself a stressor.
      4. Grievance and leave denial: Perceived unfairness in leave sanction, posting and promotion converts an administrative decision into a personal grievance with no accessible appeal.
      5. Stigma around psychological help: Seeking counselling is read within the force as an admission of unfitness for armed duty, which suppresses the demand for the support that does exist.

      What does the National Human Rights Commission’s intervention add to the response?

      1. External scrutiny: The National Human Rights Commission took note of the rising figures last week and sought reports from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Director General of the force.
      2. Reframing the issue as a rights question: The Commission’s entry treats deaths in service as a question of the State’s obligation to its own personnel rather than as an internal personnel matter.
      3. A reporting obligation: A requisition from the Commission compels a written response from both the administrative ministry and the force, creating a record that survives changes in command.
      4. Timing: The core group’s formation and the Commission’s notice fall in the same month, so the force’s internal mechanism now operates under an external deadline.

      Challenges to the CRPF’s self harm prevention mechanism

      1. A review body without a treatment capacity: A monthly review can classify causes but cannot supply the clinical care the classification points to, and psychiatrist and counsellor strength in the central armed police forces remains far below the deployed strength. Eg. Composite hospitals of the central armed police forces routinely operate with a single mental health specialist serving several battalions spread across districts.
      2. Under reporting of distress: Personnel avoid recording psychological symptoms because a medical entry can affect weapon issue, posting and promotion prospects. Eg. Screening drives in armed forces and central police organisations consistently record self reported distress far below the levels found in anonymous surveys of the same units.
      3. Housing and family accommodation deficit: Family accommodation available to central armed police force personnel falls well short of the authorised requirement, which keeps families separated even at peace stations. Eg. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs has repeatedly recorded a housing satisfaction ratio below half the sanctioned entitlement across the central armed police forces.
      4. Leave and rotation practice: Announced entitlements are overridden by operational exigency in the very theatres where the stress is highest. Eg. The force’s initiative to give personnel around 100 days with their families each year has proved hardest to implement in the Left Wing Extremism theatre where deployment density is greatest.
      5. Weapon access at the point of crisis: Personnel on duty carry service weapons continuously, which removes the interval between intent and act that prevention depends on. Eg. Several of the deaths recorded between 2021 and May 2026 occurred while the personnel were on duty, when the service weapon was in hand.
      6. Fratricide and grievance escalation: Unresolved interpersonal grievance within a small deployed unit escalates into violence against colleagues as well as self harm. Eg. Fratricide incidents in central armed police force camps have prompted the Bureau of Police Research and Development to study stress and grievance handling in deployed units.

      Conclusion

      The Central Reserve Police Force has moved suicide prevention from ad hoc unit level handling to a monthly review chaired by its Director General, after 2025 recorded the highest figure in five years. The immediate status is that the core group stands constituted and the National Human Rights Commission has sought reports from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the force. The next expected step is the submission of those reports and the first monthly review sitting of the core group.

    9. After Naxalism, a development corridor

      Why in the News

      The Centre declared the country free from Naxalism on 31 March 2026, closing a security campaign that ran for decades across the forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and the rest of the former Red Corridor. The tension this exposes is that the military defeat of an insurgency does not by itself produce the economic activity that must occupy the space the guns have vacated.

      What is Left Wing Extremism and what was the Red Corridor?

      1. The movement: Left Wing Extremism (LWE), commonly called Naxalism, is an armed insurgency pursuing the capture of state power through protracted rural armed struggle, drawing on Maoist doctrine.
      2. The territory: The Red Corridor was the contiguous belt of forested and mineral-rich districts across central and eastern India where Maoist cadres exercised effective control and the state's writ was contested.
      3. What that control looked like: For decades the region was associated with ambushes, armed cadres and Maoist control rather than with routine administration.
      4. The declared end point: The Centre declared the country free from Naxalism on 31 March 2026, which is treated as a turning point rather than as the end of the task.

      What are CoBRA units?

      1. What they are: Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) is the specialised jungle warfare and guerrilla warfare force raised within the Central Reserve Police Force for anti-Naxal operations.
      2. Their role here: CoBRA units, deployed alongside state police forces, carried out the operations that dismantled strongholds which had remained difficult to penetrate for years.

      What was the strategy that dismantled the insurgency?

      1. Intelligence-led operations: Operations were driven by actionable intelligence on cadre location and movement rather than by area domination alone.
      2. Centre and state coordination: Greater coordination between central and state forces removed the seams across state borders that cadres had used to evade pursuit.
      3. Disruption of Maoist financing: Agencies targeted the financial networks that sustained the insurgency, cutting the flow that paid, armed and supplied cadres.
      4. Rehabilitation: A surrender policy sought to bring former cadres back into civilian life through financial assistance, training and support for reintegration.
      5. Sustained expansion of the security grid: The security presence was expanded continuously rather than surged and withdrawn, so that recovered territory was held.
      6. Political direction from the top: Repeated engagement by the Union Home Minister, including visits to Bastar and security review meetings on the ground, kept the Centre involved in an operational challenge requiring coordination between Delhi, state governments and personnel deployed deep inside difficult terrain.

      Which operations broke the strongholds?

      1. Black Forest: One of the named operations conducted by CoBRA units alongside state police forces.
      2. Octopus: A second named operation in the same series.
      3. Double Bull: A third named operation in the same series.
      4. Chakrabandha: A fourth named operation in the same series.
      5. The common outcome: Together these operations helped dismantle strongholds that had remained difficult to penetrate for years, which is what allowed a more permanent state presence to be established.

      What has the development push delivered since 2014?

      1. Security infrastructure: 408 new security camps and 597 fortified police stations have been established in LWE-affected areas since 2014.
      2. Road connectivity: More than 12,000 km of roads have been constructed in the affected regions.
      3. Formal finance: 1,804 bank branches and 1,321 ATMs have been added.
      4. Postal reach: 6,025 post offices have been added.
      5. Telecommunications: Mobile connectivity has expanded across most villages in the affected regions.
      6. Education and skills: Eklavya Model Residential Schools, Industrial Training Institutes and skill development centres have been established alongside the physical infrastructure.

      Why does a road, a bank branch or a tower change more than the statistic suggests?

      1. Roads change access, not distance: A road changes access to a market and to a hospital, converting a physical distance into a usable one.
      2. Bank branches change the terms of credit: A bank branch connects households to formal finance and displaces the informal lender who set the terms in its absence.
      3. Towers change the relationship to the state: A telecom tower brings a remote village closer to the rest of the country, which affects everything from grievance redress to remittances.
      4. Schools change the option set: A school or a skill centre expands the choices available to young people, which is the mechanism by which recruitment into an insurgency loses its appeal.
      5. The sequencing that made it possible: These interventions became feasible only once security forces could establish a more permanent presence in areas where the state had previously struggled to maintain one.

      Why is the end of armed conflict the easier half of the task?

      1. The achievement is a milestone, not an outcome: The guns going silent is an important milestone, and the harder task is ensuring that the space they leave behind is filled with roads, schools, businesses, livelihoods and functioning institutions.
      2. The nature of the state's presence must change: The objective now is a state presence defined by institutions and opportunity rather than by the security challenge that once dominated the landscape.
      3. Infrastructure is an input, not a result: Roads, branches and towers must begin to generate sustained economic activity, better education and greater integration with the rest of India, which is not automatic.
      4. The next phase is less visible: The coming phase will be less dramatic than the operations that made the headlines, and could be more important in determining the legacy of the campaign.
      5. Reversibility is the risk: Rehabilitation must hold, since the surrender policy's purpose is to prevent former cadres from returning to the movement and to prevent the movement from replenishing its ranks.
      6. The test stated: The former Red Corridor becomes a development corridor only when the infrastructure now reaching these regions begins to generate sustained economic activity, which is where the larger test begins.

      Conclusion

      The military campaign against Left Wing Extremism succeeded through intelligence-led operations, central and state coordination, disruption of financing, rehabilitation and a sustained security grid, and the Centre declared the country free from Naxalism on 31 March 2026. The infrastructure that followed, 408 camps, 597 fortified police stations, over 12,000 km of roads, 1,804 bank branches, 1,321 ATMs and 6,025 post offices, has changed the physical reach of the state. What remains unresolved is whether that reach converts into sustained economic activity and institutions, since the durability of the achievement will be judged on that conversion and not on the operations.

      Left Wing Extremism in India

      1. What it is: Left Wing Extremism is an armed movement seeking to overthrow the state through protracted people's war, organised around rural base areas, guerrilla zones and armed squads.
      2. Origin: The movement takes its popular name from the 1967 peasant uprising at Naxalbari in West Bengal.
      3. Present organisation: The Communist Party of India (Maoist) was formed in 2004 through the merger of the People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre of India, and is proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
      4. Geographic concentration: Activity was concentrated in a forested, mineral-rich and tribal-majority belt spanning Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal.
      5. Structural drivers: The movement drew on land alienation, displacement by mining and infrastructure projects, denial of forest rights, absence of administration and the weakness of local grievance redress in Fifth Schedule areas.
      6. The doctrinal frame: The Union government's approach has been organised around the SAMADHAN doctrine, which sets out the components of the counter-insurgency response.
      7. Institutional lead: The Ministry of Home Affairs coordinates the response through the Left Wing Extremism Division, with the Central Reserve Police Force as the principal central force deployed.

      Laws Governing the Response to Left Wing Extremism

      1. Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967: The principal central law used to proscribe the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and its front organisations and to prosecute membership and support.
      2. The 2019 amendment allows the designation of individuals, not only organisations, as terrorists.
      3. Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002: The instrument used to trace and attach the financial networks that sustained the insurgency.
      4. Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005: A state law empowering the declaration of organisations as unlawful and criminalising membership and assistance in the most affected state.
      5. Andhra Pradesh Public Security Act, 1992: The corresponding state instrument in the southern part of the former corridor.
      6. Arms Act, 1959 and Explosive Substances Act, 1908: Govern possession and use of weapons and explosives, which are the principal charges alongside the terrorism statutes.
      7. Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA): Extends panchayat provisions to Fifth Schedule areas and vests the Gram Sabha with powers over land, minor minerals and local plans, addressing a grievance the insurgency mobilised.
      8. Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006: Recognises individual and community forest rights, addressing the land and forest alienation that underpinned recruitment.
      9. Fifth Schedule to the Constitution: Governs the administration of Scheduled Areas through the Governor and the Tribes Advisory Council, and is the constitutional frame within which most affected districts sit.

      Government Initiatives for Left Wing Extremism Affected Areas

      1. National Policy and Action Plan, 2015: The overarching framework combining security measures, development interventions, rights and entitlements of local communities, and public perception management.
      2. Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Scheme: Reimburses state governments for security-related expenditure including training, operational costs, ex gratia payments and the surrender and rehabilitation of former cadres.
      3. Special Central Assistance (SCA) for the most affected districts: Funds public infrastructure and services in the districts of highest concern, filling critical gaps identified by district administrations.
      4. Special Infrastructure Scheme (SIS): Strengthens state police infrastructure, including special forces and fortified police stations, in affected states.
      5. Road Connectivity Project for LWE Affected Areas (RCPLWEA): Successor to the Road Requirement Plan, it constructs and upgrades roads and bridges to open isolated blocks to administration and markets.
      6. LWE Mobile Tower Project: Installs mobile towers in affected districts to extend telecommunications where commercial operators would not otherwise invest.
      7. Eklavya Model Residential Schools: Provide residential schooling for tribal children in blocks with high Scheduled Tribe population, extending secondary education in the affected belt.
      8. Aspirational Districts Programme: Targets the least developed districts, a large share of which fall in the former corridor, on health, nutrition, education, agriculture, financial inclusion and infrastructure indicators.
      9. Civic Action Programme: Funds central armed police forces to conduct welfare activities that build confidence between security forces and local communities.

      Back2Basics: The SAMADHAN Doctrine

      1. What it is: SAMADHAN is the Union government's stated doctrine for countering Left Wing Extremism, articulated as an eight-point formulation.
      2. S, Smart leadership: Leadership capable of directing an operation that spans police, intelligence and administration.
      3. A, Aggressive strategy: A posture of sustained offensive operations rather than defensive holding.
      4. M, Motivation and training: Continuous training and morale management for deployed forces.
      5. A, Actionable intelligence: Intelligence specific enough to act on, which is the input the campaign was built around.
      6. D, Dashboard-based key result areas and key performance indicators: Measured performance targets for units and districts.
      7. H, Harnessing technology: Use of surveillance, communications and data tools in operations.
      8. A, Action plan for each theatre: A theatre-specific plan rather than a uniform national approach.
      9. N, No access to financing: Cutting the financial networks that sustain cadres, weapons and logistics.

      Key Facts about the Left Wing Extremism Campaign

      1. The declaration: The Centre declared the country free from Naxalism on 31 March 2026.
      2. Central Reserve Police Force: The largest central armed police force, it marked its Raising Day on 27 July and has been the principal force deployed in the campaign.
      3. CoBRA: The Commando Battalion for Resolute Action is the Central Reserve Police Force's specialised jungle and guerrilla warfare unit for anti-Naxal operations.
      4. Named operations: Black Forest, Octopus, Double Bull and Chakrabandha are the operations named as having dismantled entrenched strongholds.
      5. Bastar: The Bastar division of Chhattisgarh was the operational centre of the campaign and the site of repeated ministerial review visits.
      6. Infrastructure since 2014: 408 new security camps, 597 fortified police stations, over 12,000 km of roads, 1,804 bank branches, 1,321 ATMs and 6,025 post offices in affected areas.
      7. The origin marker: The movement is named after Naxalbari in West Bengal, the site of the 1967 uprising.

      Challenges in Consolidating the Post-Insurgency Transition

      1. Infrastructure without economic activity: Physical assets do not automatically generate livelihoods, e.g. more than 12,000 km of roads open access to markets only where there is production to move.
      2. Reversibility of surrender: Rehabilitation fails where former cadres find no economic footing, e.g. surrendered cadres receiving one-time financial assistance without sustained employment remain vulnerable to re-recruitment.
      3. Unsettled land and forest rights: The grievance that fed recruitment persists where titles remain unrecognised, e.g. pending individual and community claims under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 in Fifth Schedule districts.
      4. Displacement from mining and industry: Development in a mineral-rich belt can reproduce the alienation the insurgency mobilised, e.g. resettlement disputes around iron ore and coal projects in Bastar and Jharkhand.
      5. Thin administrative capacity: Newly opened blocks lack the staffing to run the institutions now built, e.g. teacher and health worker vacancies in interior blocks leave schools and health centres nominally functional.
      6. Security-first institutional habits: Areas administered through a security grid do not convert automatically to civil administration, e.g. 408 security camps and 597 fortified police stations remain the most visible state presence in many blocks.
      7. Justice system backlog: Cases registered during the campaign remain unresolved and undercut confidence, e.g. long undertrial detention of tribal accused under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.
      8. Residual and displaced cadres: Movement remnants may relocate rather than dissolve, e.g. cadre movement across inter-state boundaries has historically shifted the problem rather than ended it.
      9. Fragile fiscal continuity: Development spending contingent on the insurgency's salience declines once the emergency is declared over, e.g. schemes framed as LWE-specific lose their justification the moment the region is declared free.

      Way Forward

      1. Shift funding from security-tagged to development-tagged windows: Convert LWE-specific central assistance into sustained district development funding, so financing does not lapse with the security declaration.
      2. Complete forest rights recognition: Clear the backlog of individual and community forest rights claims in the former corridor, which addresses the grievance the movement recruited on.
      3. Staff the institutions already built: Fill teacher, health worker and revenue staff vacancies in the newly connected blocks, since a building without staff does not constitute a functioning institution.
      4. Link infrastructure to production: Tie the road, banking and connectivity network to minor forest produce value chains, agro-processing and local enterprise credit, so that access converts into income.
      5. Make rehabilitation employment-linked: Extend the surrender policy beyond financial assistance into guaranteed placement in skill centres, Industrial Training Institutes and public works, so reintegration is durable.
      6. Strengthen PESA implementation: Operationalise Gram Sabha powers over land, minor minerals and local plans under the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, so local consent governs the next phase of development.
      7. Fast-track pending cases: Establish dedicated courts to clear the backlog of insurgency-era cases, since prolonged undertrial detention undermines the legitimacy the campaign gained.

      Matching Previous Year Question

      “[2025, GS3, 10 marks] The Government of India recently stated that Left Wing Extremism (LWE) will be eliminated by 2026. What do you understand by LWE and how are the people affected by it? What measures have been taken by the government to eliminate LWE?”