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.