The government on Monday unveiled the country’s first counter-terrorism policy, “Prahaar”, setting out a multi-layered strategy based on “zero tolerance”, intelligence-led prevention and disruption of extremist violence that aims to deny terrorists, their financiers and supporters access to funds, weapons and safe havens.
The policy unveiled by the home ministry is based on seven key pillars to counter the terror threats emanating from India or abroad — prevention, responses, aggregating internal capacities, human rights and “Rule of Law”-based processes, attenuating the conditions enabling terrorism including radicalisation, aligning and shaping the international efforts to counter terrorism and recovery and resilience through a whole-of-society approach. “There has been a history of sporadic instability in the immediate neighbourhood of India, which has often given rise to ungoverned spaces. Besides, a few countries in the region have sometimes used terrorism as an instrument of State policy,” the document said, without naming Pakistan.
“Notwithstanding this, India does not link terrorism to any specific religion, ethnicity, nationality or civilisation. India has always denounced terrorism and its use by any actor for achieving any stated or unstated ends unambiguously and unequivocally,” it added.