India needs to modernize defence doctrine: PM

NEW DELHI - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Friday said India needs to be prepared to fight “new and non-traditional threats to our national security” for which the country has to revisit its defence doctrine and modernize it.

“We have to be prepared to deal with threats to our security from non-state actors and groups (who) are becoming increasingly fused and employing the best technologies to target open and democratic societies like ours,” Manmohan Singh said, addressing a seminar on the golden jubilee of the National Defence College in New Delhi.

The prime minister said the internal and external aspects of the national security were getting increasingly inter-linked.

“We have therefore to modernize our defence doctrines to respond to new and non-traditional threats to our national security,” he emphasised.

He said India was a victim of terror for the past more than two decades, and added that the government “will ensure that our capabilities to combat terrorism remain a step ahead of those of the terrorists”.

“They should be left in no doubt about our ability and resolve to defeat them,” he said.

He reiterated that Maoist insurgency posed “a great threat to our national security” even as the government recognized “that there is a development deficit in all parts of our country”.

“We should be equally clear that the Indian state cannot and will not allow its authority to be challenged,” he said.

He said an “enlightened national security policy” based on a holistic appreciation of the many inter-related aspects and concerns impinging on a nation’s overall well-being needed to be drawn.

The prime minister said the concept of contemporary national security needed to be understood “within a wider strategic and economic and social matrix”.

But, he said, these imperatives have not necessarily changed the importance and role of military power as an essential indispensable component of a nation’s power and stability.

“Defence capabilities buttress the ability of a state to defend itself against armed aggression or insurgency. They act as deterrence to the use of force by others.”