Gap between India's internal, external security narrowing: Defence minister

Indian defence minister Rajnath Singh on Monday (17) said it has been seen in the last two decades that the gap between the internal and external security is reducing and a country's independent media, judiciary, NGOs and dynamic democracy can be misused to destroy its security.

Addressing the second convocation of the Rashtriya Raksha University at Lavad village in Gujarat's Gandhinagar district, Singh stressed on the need for state agencies to work in an integrated manner.

With the changing times, there has been a tremendous change in security dimensions, he said.

"We generally see security from two aspects - internal and external. But in the last two decades, it has been seen that the gap between the internal and external security is reducing," Singh said. "In a hybrid war, the lines between the internal and external security almost disappear," he said.

The defence minister said social media, NGOs, judiciary and democracy of a country can be misused by forces working to destroy its security.

"An independent social media can be used to carry out systematic propaganda. The freedom of social media is not bad, media should be free, but if the media is free, it can be misused...Attempts are made to establish and propagate dangerous and controversial things in the name of freedom of expression," he said.

"If the NGOs are free, efforts are made to use them in such a way that the entire system of the country is paralysed," Singh said. "If the judiciary is free, efforts are made to use it to stop or slow down the works of development using the legal system. If a country has a dynamic democracy, then effort is made to infiltrate political parties to attack its unity and security," he said.

These are not mere imaginations, but words of strategists and are detailed in security documents of some countries, he said. Singh also used the example of some media reports which said that 50 per cent of tweets in connection with the case of violence at Koregaon-Bhima (in Maharashtra's Pune district in 2018) originated from Pakistan.