Comprehensive Security for an Emerging India

Kapil Kak

This volume objectively evaluates the headwinds of comprehensive security challenges that India would confront in the years ahead. Over nearly two decades, India has made successful transitions to ‘emerge’ on the regional and global scene, but informed and reasoned analyses of the multi-dimensional dangers that loom large, and the common opportunities available, have been lacking. It is hoped that this lacuna would be filled to an extent by this volume, in which leading luminaries on ‘hard’ and non-traditional security issues have provided incisive inputs that together shape the meta-narratives on comprehensive security in the Indian context.

The aforementioned dimensions include internal security, foreign policy, military force application, state-sponsored terrorism, left wing and religious extremism, and nuclear proliferation at one end, and the global challenges of energy, food, climate change and water that can best be resolved through substantial cooperation of the international community, on the other. It is to be hoped that this volume would serve to further enrich the existing material and discourse on India’s comprehensive security challenges that would be both unpredictable and discontinuous.

Kapil Kak Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak AVSM VSM (Retd), a veteran of two wars – 1965 and 1971 – has, post-retirement, served as Deputy Director, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, and Adviser (Strategic Studies), University of Jammu, apart from representing India in a number of Track II conferences on international security issues. A regular commentator on security issues in the electronic media and a prolific contributor of articles to a variety of journals, he co-edited the book India and Pakistan: Pathways Ahead. Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak is currently Additional Director, Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi.