On May 11, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was addressing an election rally in Kerala compared the state with crisis-hit Somalia. Keralites took to social media to vent their ire against Modi for such a comparison and the hash tag #PoMoneModi (a play on a Malayalam film dialogue – Po Mone Dinesha) started trending on Twitter.
Ironically, the latest Global Terrorism Index (GTI) published by Institute for Economics and Peace shows that there is only a minor difference between the two countries, India and Somalia, in terms of terror attacks. On a scale of one to ten, India scores 7.484 at eighth position while Somalia stands right above at seventh with a score of 7.548.
**Source: START GTD, IEP calculations*
However, when we analyse the data from previous four or five GTI reports, India has seen improvements. The report said, “In 2015, India had the highest number of attacks since 2000, whilst paradoxically it had the second lowest number of deaths for a single year since 2000.” Almost 80 per cent of the attacks had no casualties.
The disparity between fatalities and attacks perhaps indicate that the nature of terrorism in India is different. Most of these groups seem to be looking for political recognition rather than killing people. For example, around 10 attacks came from the People’s Liberation Army in India which resulted in no casualties.
**Source: START GTD, IEP calculations*
In plain numbers, India saw 289 deaths from 800 attacks, which accounts for 7% of terror attacks globally. Most of these attacks were targeted towards the government which is also the case in other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to the report, the two most deadly terror groups of 2015 are Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizbul Mujahedeen. Another surprising factor from the report is that among the 49 different terrorist groups that engaged in terrorism, “four of them accounted for 72 per cent of all deaths”.
For example, two Maoist attacks claimed around 176 deaths, mainly comprising police officers operating in Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha.
Predictably, the main source of Islamist terrorism comes from the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan. LeT and Hizbul Mujahedeen killed 33 civilians in 2015.
Meanwhile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — countries worst-affected by terrorism —constitute 47% of overall terror attacks across the world.
**Source: START GTD, IEP calculations*