India faces an array of national security challenges ranging from territorial disputes with China and Pakistan, state-sponsored cross-border terrorism to internal security issues related, ethnic and class-based insurgencies. Its national security agenda encompasses issues related to economics, environment, development and transnational criminal activities. More than two decades of rapid economic growth in India has also added energy security to the national security matrix. Associated with its economic rise, the country’s national security agenda now includes a wider vision for the Indo-Pacific, with implications for power projection and for India’s contributions to global peacekeeping missions through the United Nations.

This Handbook is the first comprehensive analysis of all the national security challenges facing India. With contributions from leading and rising scholars from across the world, the essays cover a wide range of topics including the colonial legacy; India’s wars; strategic culture; nuclear security; and the role of space, cybersecurity, terrorism, insurgencies, intelligence and civil–military relations; among others. It focuses on India’s external as well as internal security challenges and traditional as well as non-traditional challenges to India’s national security, as also on the major theoretical approaches to India’s national security and on the relationship between national security and state-making.