Policing Terrorism in India

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.