Abstract
Policing terrorism in India is fraught with difficulty. India is a large, heterogeneous democracy that is surrounded by countries experiencing their own intense problems with terrorism. The legal structure, inherited from the colonial past, is struggling to cope with the demands placed upon it by a country of 1.1 billion. India is a federation and this also complicates the structures needed for counter-terrorism. Despite the democratic framework, policing in India is largely an inheritance from the non-democratic colonial past—a past that paid scant regard to the doctrine of separation of powers. Given these problems, India’s performance in policing terrorism has been mixed. We should not look for any early resolution of the problem of terrorism, either through preventive investigation or political amelioration of the issues that contribute to terrorism. But for all of that, India has done well to adhere to its basic democratic norms in the face of what is, by Western standards, a major terrorism problem.
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Notes
Iraq had a total of 97,588 victims over the same period [2].
PM’s High Level Committee, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India [3].
For a more detailed discussion see, [7]
For a copy of the Model Police Act 2006, see, [10]
For example the leader of the opposition of Tamil Nadu was arrested under POTA for advocacy on behalf of the LTTE.
The balance is made up of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis.
This technique appears to require the prior consent of a magistrate.
See [20]
For the Rajasthan bombing see [21]. The bombings of the Samjhauta express killed 68. So far, those who allegedly sold the suitcases containing the bombs to the bombers have been arrested but at time of writing there have been no follow-up arrests.
Sahni claims that authorities in Hyderabad successfully broke up six terrorist cells [9].
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Gordon, S. Policing terrorism in India. Crime Law Soc Change 50, 111–124 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-008-9123-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-008-9123-7