India’s internal security environment in 2025 reflects a complex interaction between long-standing conflict patterns and rapidly evolving threats. Manifest violence in the country’s multiple insurgencies has dipped dramatically, from a peak of 5,504 fatalities in 2001—including J&K, Northeast, Left Wing Extremist (LWE), and Islamist terrorism outside these theatres. This was down to 654 fatalities in 2025 (including 501 militants), of which just 92 in J&K (46 militants), 474 in LWE (389 militants), 70 in the Northeast (63 militants), 12 in other Islamist terrorism (one suicide bomber) and six in Punjab (including two militants). The South Asia Terrorism Portal data (till December 27, 2025) indicates clearly that, though these threats are yet to be neutralised, the present stage is one of rapid attrition of surviving insurgent forces, with kill ratios dramatically skewed against militants.
While manifest violence has declined dramatically over the past two decades, a pervasive sense of insecurity and instability persists. Multiple challenges to internal security, beyond insurgency and terrorism, include social, political and communal polarisation, a rising threat of organised crime—including, in some cases, rapidly crystallising domestic and global criminal-terrorist networks—and the potentially major risk of the spillover of the neighbourhood’s instability. Each domestic threat is substantially compounded by stresses produced by India’s current economic paradigm, substantially based on the American model of predatory capitalism (more accurately, oligopoly), and the escalating growth of inequalities of income and wealth, the contraction of employment and opportunities, and corporate rapacity that has produced deep anxieties—particularly in rural and remote areas, where the threat, in many cases the reality, of expropriation or of deteriorating environmental conditions, is creating widely shared experiences of acute distress.
The coexistence of declining objective indices of conflict with a rising subjective sense of public insecurity reflects a structural shift in risk perception. Large-scale insurgencies, mass-casualty terrorist attacks, and organised riots—forms of violence that are easily counted and tracked, and that are geographically localised —have declined sharply. What has grown instead are episodic, low-intensity but high-visibility incidents: lynchings, lone-actor attacks, targeted assassinations, road rage killings, communal provocations, and localised criminal violence. These events do not significantly affect national conflict metrics, but they generate disproportionate fear because they appear arbitrary, sudden, and proximate to everyday life. A wider population fears random violence more than structured conflict.
Further, the digital and social media has radically altered threat perception. Social media platforms amplify exceptional events, strip them of context, and circulate them repeatedly across time and space. Graphic imagery, emotive framing, and algorithmic bubbles ensure that rare incidents feel ubiquitous. Misinformation and deliberate disinformation exaggerate threats, fabricate rumours, or portray isolated crimes as evidence of comprehensive breakdown. The result is a persistent atmosphere of alarm, disconnected from empirical trends.
Crucially, this overlaps with dramatic erosion of institutional trust. Even where violence is declining, citizens increasingly doubt the neutrality, responsiveness, or effectiveness of state institutions. Delayed justice, selective enforcement, perceived political interference, and visible impunity in high-profile cases weaken confidence that the state will protect individuals impartially. People feel insecure not because violence is rampant, but because they are unsure whether protection will be available if something goes wrong.
Political polarisation and identity mobilisation have further heightened threat perceptions. Rhetoric alone can create a sense of siege, especially among minorities or politically marginalised groups. Polarisation reduces social trust, making everyday interactions feel fraught and potentially dangerous. Increasing economic precarity and social stress magnify this insecurity.
The state’s security posture itself contributes to unease. Highly visible policing, surveillance measures and extensive police and armed deployments signal omnipresent danger. When preventive security becomes routinised, it normalises fear rather than reassurance. Conflict data, moreover, captures deaths, attacks, and incidents, but does not measure humiliation, harassment, intimidation, or the cumulative impact of everyday coercion—‘bulldozer justice’, heavy-handed policing, and arbitrary and unaccountable political and administrative action. Indeed, the absence of identifiable frontlines or warning signs makes people feel exposed everywhere, even when objective danger is minimal. For many citizens, insecurity is experienced not as lethal violence, but as persistent vulnerability.