Counterinsurgency in India: Strategies and Challenges

From the moment India became independent in 1947, it has had to fight armed movements that challenge the authority of the state from within. Some of these are rooted in ethnic identity, some in religion, and others in radical ideology. What stands out is not just the number of insurgencies the country has faced, but the distinctive way it has chosen to fight them. Rather than crushing rebellions through overwhelming firepower, the Indian approach has leaned towards restraint, political accommodation, and earning the trust of ordinary people. This blog explains how that doctrine works, why it developed the way it did, and how it differs sharply from the methods used by neighbouring states.

The roots of insurgency since 1947 🔗

Insurgency is not a single problem in India but a cluster of very different conflicts. Since independence, the state has battled four distinct insurgencies on its own soil, located in Punjab, Kashmir, the Northeast, and the Maoist belt of central and eastern India. Each grew out of separate grievances, and each demanded a slightly different response.

Ethnic and regional movements in the Northeast 🔗

The earliest sustained insurgencies appeared in the Northeast. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the region saw overlapping waves of tribal and ethnic uprisings, starting with the Naga and later the Mizo rebellions. These movements were driven by demands for autonomy or outright separation, fuelled by a sense that the region’s distinct identities were being ignored by distant authorities. Over decades, the state managed to wear down several of these movements and eventually signed peace accords with both the Naga and Mizo leaderships, although tensions in the region have never fully disappeared.

Punjab and Kashmir 🔗

The 1980s brought a violent separatist movement in Punjab demanding a Sikh homeland. The state responded with a hard-edged campaign that broke the insurgency by the early 1990s, though at the cost of serious human rights concerns. Around the same time, a Pakistan-backed insurgency erupted in Jammu and Kashmir in the late 1980s. This conflict, which mixed local discontent with cross-border militancy, became the most prolonged and heavily militarised of India’s internal security challenges.

The Naxalite or Maoist insurgency 🔗

The longest-running of them all began in 1967 with the Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal, when peasants and lower-caste groups revolted against landlords. This evolved into the Maoist insurgency that spread through a swathe of central and eastern India known as the “Red Corridor.” Unlike the ethnic or religious movements elsewhere, the Naxalite struggle is built on class grievances and recruits among landless farmers and tribal communities who feel excluded from the country’s economic growth. In 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described it as the biggest internal security challenge facing the country, and it remains active today.

The Indian Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine 🔗

Out of this long experience emerged a formal framework. In December 2006, the Army issued its Doctrine for Sub-Conventional Operations, which gathered decades of practical lessons into a single guiding philosophy based on the minimum use of force.

Iron fist in velvet glove 🔗

The doctrine is summed up in a memorable phrase. The Army’s official position describes its approach as the “iron fist in velvet glove”. The idea is straightforward: a hard, decisive response is reserved for the militants themselves, while the local population is treated with restraint and respect. The Army describes the people of an affected area as the centre of gravity of any operation, meaning that the conflict is ultimately won or lost depending on whose side ordinary citizens choose to support.

Winning hearts and minds 🔗

This brings us to the cornerstone of the whole approach, the hearts and minds strategy. The concept itself is borrowed from the British campaign in Malaya, where authorities combined security operations with welfare measures to keep the population from siding with insurgents. The logic is that an insurgency cannot survive without the cooperation, or at least the silence, of the people around it. If the state can win their trust, it isolates the militants and starves them of recruits, shelter, and information. In Kashmir, this thinking was put into practice through Operation Sadbhavana, launched in 1998, which shifted the focus from purely military action towards goodwill projects aimed at local welfare.

Specialised forces and legal powers 🔗

To carry out these operations, India developed dedicated forces rather than relying on regular infantry. The Rashtriya Rifles was raised specifically for counterinsurgency in Kashmir, and states facing the Maoist threat created their own units. Andhra Pradesh’s elite Greyhounds force inspired similar formations elsewhere, while the central government set up the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action, known as CoBRA, within the Central Reserve Police Force.

Operations in disturbed areas are also backed by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or AFSPA, which gives security forces wide latitude to act. The Act remains deeply controversial because the same powers that allow rapid action can also enable abuse, and critics argue it sits uneasily with the doctrine’s stated commitment to human rights.

A coordinated response across military, political, and economic fronts 🔗

One insight runs through the entire Indian approach: insurgency is fundamentally a political problem, not just a military one. As analysts have noted, the army may take the lead in operations, but lasting success depends on civilian actors and the quality of governance. For this reason, military pressure is meant to work alongside political and economic measures.

On the political front, the state has repeatedly used negotiation and accommodation, signing accords with insurgent groups in the Northeast and integrating former militants into mainstream life. On the economic front, the government invests in roads, schools, hospitals, and employment in affected regions, on the principle that development reduces the appeal of armed groups who thrive on poverty and neglect. The military’s job, in this model, is to create enough security for these political and economic efforts to take hold.

How India compares with its neighbours 🔗

The Indian record looks especially distinctive when placed beside how other South Asian states have handled their own insurgencies.

Sri Lanka’s all-out military model 🔗

Sri Lanka took almost the opposite path. Facing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, one of the world’s most lethal insurgent groups, President Mahinda Rajapaksa adopted what came to be called the Rajapaksa model. It rejected negotiation in favour of an explicit policy to eliminate and annihilate. The military budget rose by 40 percent and tens of thousands of new soldiers were recruited. The campaign ended the 26-year war with a decisive victory in 2009, but it came at the cost of large-scale civilian casualties and lasting allegations of human rights violations. It demonstrated that an insurgency can be crushed by force alone, but at a moral and social price India’s doctrine is designed to avoid.

Pakistan’s continuing struggles 🔗

Pakistan offers a different lesson. Its campaigns against militant groups in the tribal areas and against the Pakistani Taliban have relied heavily on military operations, often displacing huge numbers of civilians. The recurring displacement and instability show how a security-first approach without a credible political settlement tends to suppress violence temporarily rather than resolve it.

Nepal’s political settlement 🔗

Nepal took yet another route. Its decade-long Maoist insurgency ended in 2006 not through military victory but through a comprehensive peace agreement. The settlement brought former insurgents into mainstream politics and addressed many of their demands for socio-economic reform. Nepal’s experience underlines the value of directly tackling the root causes of rebellion, an idea that resonates with the political side of India’s own doctrine.

Persistent challenges 🔗

For all its sophistication, the Indian approach is far from flawless. The gap between doctrine and practice is real. Even as the official narrative stresses respect for human rights, those standards have not always been upheld on the ground, and incidents of heavy-handed action can quickly erode the very trust the strategy depends on. The 2016 unrest in Kashmir, which mobilised thousands of alienated youth, showed how fragile public sentiment can be.

There are structural problems too. Poor coordination and weak information-sharing between different security and intelligence agencies can blunt operations. Bureaucratic delays in delivering development projects frustrate communities that were promised change. And the Maoist insurgency, despite years of effort, has proved stubbornly difficult to defeat, in part because the deep economic grievances feeding it remain unresolved. The lesson is that military containment buys time, but only genuine governance closes the door on insurgency for good.

What do you think? Does the “iron fist in velvet glove” doctrine strike the right balance between security and the protection of civilian rights, or does the continued use of laws like AFSPA undermine that balance? And given Nepal’s success with a negotiated settlement, should political accommodation play an even larger role than military force in resolving India’s remaining insurgencies?

References

1. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/indias-approach-to-counterinsurgency-and-the-naxalite-problem/
2. https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/insurgencies-in-india-north-eastern-region/
3. https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/01/naxalite-insurgency-india-coin-strategy/
4. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/16/india-naxalite-national-counterinsurgency-force/
5. https://idsa.in/system/files/book_dixit_intro.pdf
6. https://www.indianarmy.nic.in/Site/FormTemplete/frmTempSimple.aspx?MnId=iknGBau074HN39EXwQztEQ%3D%3D&ParentID=CscFtm0JlbW0Gnykrt88 A%3D%3D
7. https://warontherocks.com/2016/09/the-case-for-revising-indias-counterinsurgency-strategy-in-kashmir/
8. https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/the-indian-doctrine-on-sub-conventional-operations/
9. https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/11/20/sri-lankas-coin-effort/
10. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/sri-lanka-and-counterinsurgency-wars/