IS SURVEILLANCE A SUCCESSFUL TOOL FOR FOILING TERROR ATTACKS AND STOPPING RADICALISATION? A CASE STUDY OF INDIAN COUNTER-TERROR MODEL POST 26/11 MUMBAI ATTACKS.
In this article, I argue that surveillance supplemented by paramilitary styled policing is the best method to check extremism and terrorism in the contemporary world. This will be demonstrated with the example of India’s security apparatus post-November 26, 2008 Mumbai attacks. This article will first talk about the ambiguous meaning of terrorism in the contemporary world and will discuss the improvements made by the Indian state in the field of security and the results are shown.
As terrorism is taking new dimensions and colours, meaning of the same has also changed over time (Ihab and Sawalha 2017). It would hard to define terrorism in a sentence but as Burgoon (2006) has pointed out some common sources across all terror outfits like social, cultural, political, religious and economic. To qualify as a terrorist, one must be politically motivated, target unarmed civilians and pledge allegiance to a subnational group (Ihab and Sawalha 2017). A line should also be drawn between terrorists and insurgents (Tan 2018) who have different goals of claiming territory and seeking independence and usually don’t target unarmed civilians unlike terrorist.
This section will talk about the changes brought in by the government post-Mumbai attacks and the results shown by the same. In the aftermath of the attacks of November 26, 2008 (commonly known as 26/11) a new counter-terror strategy was laid down. The strategy had elements from the USA, Israel and the UK (Machold 2017) (Machold 2016) but unlike these countries, India did not have a central strategy for combating terrorism as it faces mixed threats from proxies both within and outside the nation. The government’s notable initiatives in the field of intelligence included the establishment of Multiple Agency Centre, National Intelligence Grid, National Investigation Agency and revival of National Technical Research Organisation and Joint Intelligence Committee (Bhalla 2013, para 1). States were also directed to modernise their weapons arsenal, intelligence and cyber policing infrastructure and raise specialised commando units (Machold 2017). As the attackers came through the sea route, maritime security was also enhanced with better equipment for coast guards and a string of coastal surveillance radars were set up (Singh 2016). India took the path of militarizing its police force which blurred the line between police and para-military (Machold 2017). Taking a brief look at the results show that the Indian counter-terrorism model post 26/11 has been a success as the number of terrorist attacks have declined and the casualty arising from them also dropped from 1007 in 2008 to 720 to 2009 and has been declining since then (South Asian Terrorism Portal [SAP] 2018). This model has also been successful in foiling terrorist attacks in major cities and helped nab extremists like Yaseen Bhatkal, Abdul Tunda and others. No major terrorist attack or bomb blasts have taken place in urban areas (excluding the state of Jammu and Kashmir) after the implementation of this model. One of its notable success is “Operation Chakravuyh ” which aimed at checking online radicalisation and stopping Indian youths from joining the Islamic State (Rao 2017) and with a population of 1.25 billion only 75 (Barrett 2017) odd men have joined the Islamic state and more than 128 have been stopped or arrested (Tripathi 2018)
With facts and figures above mentioned, I conclude that surveillance supplemented with paramilitary styled policing is the answer to contemporary terrorism. This was proved with the success of India’s counter terror grid which was set up in the aftermath of 26/11 attacks.
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