Lt Gen A B Shivane
PVSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd)
Former Director General Mechanised Forces of the Indian Army and presently the Strategic Advisor to the Chairman CAPSI.
India’s internal security will no longer rest on walls, uniforms or after-action reports. It will rest on millions of informed citizens, fused intelligence and resilient systems that deny disruption before it spreads. In a world where adversaries weaponise disinformation and subvert institutions, India’s strength will be people, participation and pre-emption. This will turn the largest population and its youth bulge into deterrence and society itself as the strongest line of defence
India is sitting on a contradiction; it can no longer turn a blind eye. The same population scale that fuels economic ambition is now a surface area that adversaries actively game. Internal security is no longer about guarding borders or counting battalions. It plays out in neighbourhoods, chat groups, power substations, trading floors and server rooms. Threats are no longer trying to seize territory. They are trying to fracture trust, exhaust institutions and paralyse society. Treating this with yesterday’s tools is strategic negligence.
What India faces is not a policing problem. It is a systems problem. Internal security has shifted from a state-owned function to a national behaviour. Until that shift is acknowledged, India will keep reacting late, with the wrong tools and at high cost.
Society is the battlefield now
The threat matrix no longer fits neat labels. Terror groups, criminal syndicates, cyber operators and state proxies operate in overlapping layers. Geography barely matters and remains borderless and boundaryless. Encrypted platforms, financial pipes and logistics chains do the moving. A single manipulated video can trigger communal flashpoints faster than any armed unit can deploy. The battlespace geometry has enlarged the dimensions of the threat spectrum battlespace targeting the cognitive domain.
Technology has flattened the cost curve of disruption. Cheap drones can map or strike sensitive sites. Ransomware can freeze hospitals and ports. Algorithmic amplification can turn fringe narratives into mass panic within hours. The centre of gravity is society itself. Trust in institutions, cohesion between communities and confidence in information flows are now prime targets.
India has already seen the asymmetry. A physical attack causes casualties and grief. A coordinated hoax shuts airports, empties schools and agitations bleed the economy nationwide. The cyber spooking of seven airports, the cyber-attacks in 2025 and the 10/ 11 terror attack all point towards this new warfare.
Historical baggage compounds the exposure. Centuries of invasion encouraged reactive and defensive mindsets over anticipatory and predictive requirements. Colonial governance normalised fragmented comfort zones and mistrust between institutions. That legacy still shows in siloed agencies and procedural lethargy. Add cultural complacency that mistakes calm for capability, and the result is predictable vulnerability. Added to this is the public approach of ostrich culture and lack of initiative. This is a critical national cultural deficit which the Government ignore as it does not relate to vote banks.
Structural gaps keep India reactive
At the core lies a strategic vacuum. India still operates without a formal National Security Strategy that clearly defines internal security threats, desired capabilities, convergence and doctrine. Surveillance boundaries, data governance, inter-agency command lines and escalation thresholds remain fuzzy. When responsibility is blurred, accountability dissolves. The need is to transition from the much spoken slogan of ‘Whole of the Nation’ approach to ‘ Whole of Society’ Approach.
Post Mumbai 26/1, reforms improved capacity but not coherence. In spite of NIA and NATGRID, Intelligence streams remain unevenly fused. Immigration records, financial trails, telecom data and open-source sentiment analysis rarely converge in real time. Adversaries exploit these seams with patience. The state, by contrast, arrives after damage is done.
Policing is the most visible stress point. India runs well below global norms in police to population ratios, with chronic vacancies in critical states. Political interference weakens professionalism. Training to address 21st-century threats lags behind the tools and talent. One force is expected to handle left-wing extremism, urban unrest, cyber fraud, terror financing and deepfake-driven panic. Conviction rates tell the story. Low certainty of punishment breeds confidence among offenders.
Urban security mirrors the same imbalance. India’s cities host financial arteries, transport hubs, data centres and energy nodes, yet oversight remains fragmented. Private security has expanded fast, but without standardisation or integration. The biggest pan-India national source of the Private Security Industry, whose strength is more than the combined armed forces and CAPF, remains untapped and unrecognised. Resilience remains thin and optimisation weak. Banking, logistics, energy infrastructure and society remain exposed to blended attacks that combine physical disruption with digital denial.
The most dangerous gap is civic passivity. India lacks a structured National Citizens Security Culture. While in the US the slogan is ‘See Something, Say Something;’ India remains ‘See Something, Hear Something, But Never Say Something.’ An apprehension of harassment by law-enforcing agencies rather than being rewarded for it. People consume threats instead of intercepting them. Hoaxes spread faster than corrections. Disinformation thrives inside closed messaging loops. Deepfakes and organised agitation fracture social cohesion at almost zero cost to the instigator. Demography becomes a liability when awareness is absent.
Building an integrated citizens security grid
What India needs is not more agencies but an integrated architecture. An Integrated Citizens Security Grid should replace linear defence with layered resilience. Think of it as a honeycomb, linking neighbourhoods to cities, cities to states and states to the national spine. It could be a node for Internal Security Responses, Civil Defence, Disaster Relief and Awareness Education. It could also serve several state welfare aspects and build communal trust. The payoffs are unlimited.
The grid would operationalise four internal security functions. ‘Detect and report; pre-empt and prevent; protect and contain; and respond and defeat. This applies equally to bombs, cyber intrusions, financial sabotage and psychological operations.
The most dangerous gap is civic passivity. India lacks a structured National Citizens Security Culture. While in the US the slogan is ‘See Something, Say Something;’ India remains ‘See Something, Hear Something, But Never Say Something.’ An apprehension of harassment by law-enforcing agencies rather than being rewarded for it. People consume threats instead of intercepting them. Hoaxes spread faster than corrections. Disinformation thrives inside closed messaging loops. Deepfakes and organised agitation fracture social cohesion at almost zero cost to the instigator. Demography becomes a liability when awareness is absent
City Security Councils would anchor the model. Law enforcement, municipal authorities, cyber specialists, disaster responders, health services, resident associations, industry bodies and vetted volunteers would operate off shared dashboards. Financial anomalies flag early terror financing. Sentiment spikes signal brewing unrest. Sensor feeds expose intrusions before escalation.
This shifts security from episodic firefighting to probabilistic risk management. Multi-source data fusion sharpens the signal over noise. Responses scale to threat intensity instead of defaulting to blunt force. Simulations already show that such grids compress response times and reduce cascade failures.
Why public-private partnerships matter
The state cannot do this alone, and pretending otherwise is self-sabotage. Public-private partnerships are not optional. They are the accelerant.
Private firms already operate advanced surveillance, cyber defence and analytics at scale. They iterate faster than government procurement cycles. Domains like behavioural analytics, blockchain auditing and zero-trust architecture are already mature in enterprise settings. Plugging this expertise into national security is logical, not ideological.
Structured partnerships can extend national cyber commands through corporate security operations centres. Private academies can modernise police training. Joint ventures can harden infrastructure without ballooning public budgets. Risk sharing improves resilience. Shared capital builds redundant systems that absorb shocks, whether cyber or kinetic. Incentives align naturally. Secure environments attract investment. Economic confidence becomes a security dividend.
Safeguards are essential. Algorithms must be auditable. Data must remain sovereign. Oversight must be independent. Done right, partnerships strengthen the state rather than hollow it out. Models exist. Singapore’s Total Defence rests on citizen-industry alignment. Israel’s security ecosystem blends state control with private innovation. India can adapt these principles to its federal structure through tiered compacts.
Making Surakshit Bharat a reality
Surakshit Bharat is not a slogan. It is a behavioural shift. A National Citizens Security Culture must convert India’s youth bulge into a vigilance multiplier. Reporting should be intuitive. Training should be routine. Participation should be normalised. The ownership of the security of the nation must be a national pride.
Digital platforms can gamify threat recognition. Schools can embed security literacy without fear-mongering. Corporates can turn employees into trained sentinels. Success must be measured, not assumed. Hoax neutralisation time, disinformation decay rates and civic participation indices should be tracked publicly.
Institutional backing is non-negotiable. The Integrated Citizens Security Grid needs legislative grounding. Partnerships need viability funding. High-risk metros should be piloted immediately, not studied endlessly. Independent audit mechanisms must guard against abuse and mission creep.
Strategically, this flips the script. Adversaries thrive on concentration and surprise. A distributed grid denies both. Millions of informed citizens, fused intelligence and resilient nodes raise the cost of disruption beyond payoff.
The choice is stark for a nation on the rise, blessed with the largest population and the boon of a youth bulge. Move fast and turn scale into strength, or keep chasing threats after they detonate. Internal security is no longer about control. It is about participation. India has the numbers. It now needs political awakening, the architecture and the nerve to use them. The Year 2026 will be a defining year for India’s Surakshit Bharat transformation.
