CFR.org | India’s Internal Terror Troubles

While Kashmir and al-Qaeda-linked terrorism garner front-page play around the world, India's own internal terrorism problem tends to be off the radar of most American news outlets—or, at best, warranting a postage-stamp-sized wire story (NYT) buried at the bottom of an inside page. Yet terrorism-related deaths in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir dropped threefold since 2002, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal report. Violence related to Maoist extremism in India, however, defies New Delhi’s counterterrorism efforts. In April 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the leftist insurgency “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.” A new Backgrounder on terrorism in India explores the Maoist insurgency.

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