"Handling terrorism needs a multi-pronged strategy involving different stakeholders – government, political parties, civil society, security agencies, and media."Discuss critically.

Model Answer:
India is facing security problems not only from external threats but aslo from internal threats. So, handling terrorism needs a multi-pronged strategy involving different stakeholders – government, political parties, civil society, security agencies, and media.Firstly, all the political parties should have national level political consensus to devise the broad contours of planned strategy against terrorism.This will be possible only with the cooperation between the centre and state governments. Secondly, the principle of law of the land must be respected. Inadequate laws must be replaced with new comprehensive laws. Thirdly, with respect to intelligence, RAW acts as external intelligence agency while IB collects intelligence within the country. After 26/11 attacks, NATGRID and MAC have started participating in intelligence gathering also. However, still India needs to completely streamline and integrate measures to be taken to improve the intelligence gathering machinery, operational efficiency, training of security agencies, and civil administration. Fourthly, cases of terrorism should be resolved in a time bound manner. Fifthly, the State governments have limited capabilities to train their police personnel to deal with terror attacks. To overcome this, the union government should help the states to improve their capacity building. Further, based on the need of the hour, special laws and enforcing mechanisms should be developed but at the same time sufficient safeguards are required to avoid its misuse.

Topics: GS-III: Role of External State and Non State Actors in Creating Challenges to Internal Security