Security Conversations with Ashok Kumar IPS (Retd.)
Vice-Chancellor, Sports University of Haryana, Former Director General of Police, Uttarakhand | Author, "Challenges to Internal Security of India”
Security Conversations with Ashok Kumar IPS (Retd.) Former DGP, Uttarakhand | Author, "Challenges to Internal Security of India"
Q1. Bharat has cleared the jungle. But the Maoist intellectual infrastructure, university departments, legal fronts, sympathetic newsrooms, was never touched by Operation Kagar. Is the declaration of 31 March 2026 a victory, or a half-time whistle?
Look, I have seen enough of these movements to know that an idea does not die when its last gunman falls. The likes of Basava Raju can be killed in an encounter, but not an ideology. It takes time to defeat an ideology, making it a long and protracted war against the Naxalite ideology of violence. We must fight this ideology on all fronts. The armed cadre is gone, yes. That is real. That took nearly six decades of sacrifice by police personnel, CRPF jawans, and ordinary villagers who quietly cooperated at enormous personal risk. We should not be dismissive of what was achieved on 31 March. But let me tell you what I told my officers many times during my tenure: a fire you cannot see is not a fire that is out. The Maoist intellectual ecosystem, the professors who romanticise armed rebellion, the NGOs that block development projects in the name of tribal rights while actual tribals suffer, the newsrooms that give primacy to Maoist press releases, none of that was touched by Operation Kagar. It does not need to be touched by a rifle. It needs to be exposed, debated, and politically confronted in the open. Bharat won the jungle. The university is still contested territory.
Q2. Pakistan has moved from sending militants across the LoC to sending drones, narcotics, and radicalisation algorithms. The weapon has changed; the intent has not. Where is the sharpest gap in Bharat's counter-architecture today?
The intent has never changed; bleed Bharat through a thousand cuts, at a cost Pakistan can sustain and Bharat cannot easily attribute. What has changed is the delivery mechanism, and that is where our gap lies. We are still largely organised around the threat of the 1990s, the trained militant, the physical infiltration, the recoverable weapon. Pakistan has industrialised the proxy. Drones carry narcotics; narcotics finance sleeper cells; sleeper cells receive activation through encrypted platforms; encrypted platforms are fed by ISI-directed social media operations that manufacture grievance in our hinterland. It is one seamless pipeline, and we are still disrupting it in silos. BSF handles the drone, the NCB handles the narcotics, the state police handles the sleeper cell, and the IT Ministry handles the platform. No single agency owns the entire pipeline. That integration gap is the sharpest vulnerability we have today. However, with the Prahar policy in place now, we can hope for better integration and more technologically advanced counter-terrorist operations. This includes improved intelligence gathering and deeper technological interventions, which is what we expect and hope for moving forward.
Q3. May 2025 proved that a five-hundred-dollar drone can hold a nuclear-armed state's civilian infrastructure hostage. How must Bharat's police and paramilitary forces restructure for a battlefield with no uniform, no front line, and no return address?
The first thing we must accept is that the drone is not a military problem with a police footnote. It is a public safety problem with a military dimension. When a commercial quadcopter drops an IED near a power substation in a border district, the Army is not the first phone call. The SHO of the nearest police station is. And that SHO, who is a good officer, a hardworking officer, has absolutely no idea what he is looking at or what he is supposed to do next. That gap between the nature of the threat and the preparedness of the first responder, that is where I worry most. Counter-drone capability must come down from specialised central units and reach the district level, not in a diluted form but meaningfully. Our ground units and state armed police forces—such as PAC, RAC, HAP, and PAP—must be equipped with counter-drone technology and properly trained. Because the state police is always the first responder, enhancing their capabilities is essential. Beyond equipment, the bigger shift must be in how we train officers to think. For decades we trained for a visible enemy who occupies a geography. Today the threat has no address. The person who ordered the strike could be in another country, the financing could have moved through three continents in cryptocurrency, and the drone itself is sold openly on the internet. We need officers who are comfortable thinking in those terms. That is a completely different intellectual formation from what our academies currently produce.
Q4. You sent fifty corrupt public servants to jail in two years as Director Vigilance, because you understood that administrative rot was the Maoist's best recruiter. As Bharat now moves to fill the governance vacuum in the former Red Corridor, what is the single non-negotiable?
When I ran the Fight Against Corruption initiative, what struck me was not that corruption existed. It exists everywhere. What struck me was how normalised it had become for the person at the bottom. The tribal farmer did not even bother reporting extortion anymore because he had stopped believing anything would happen. That despair is what the Maoist walks into with a bag of rice and a grievance pamphlet. He does not need to argue ideology. He just needs to point at the forest guard outside and say, see, the state does not care about you. He wins that argument without even trying. Now Bharat is moving into these areas with roads, schools, and connectivity, and all of that is genuinely needed. But if the same forest official who harassed these families for decades is still the face of the state when the CRPF column moves out, we have changed the infrastructure and changed nothing else. The Forest Rights Act, implemented honestly, the Gram Sabha given real authority under PESA, not on paper but in practice, that is the non-negotiable. Everything else is furniture. Rights are the foundation.
Q5. The officer who will be DGP in 2045, the threats he will face, AI-driven influence operations, drone swarms, cyber strikes on critical infrastructure; did not exist when you were trained. What must change, fundamentally, in how Bharat builds its security leadership?
I came into the IPS from IIT Delhi, Mechanical Engineering for my B.Tech, Thermal Engineering for my M.Tech. My colleagues thought it was an odd choice. But I will tell you something: the habit of analytical thinking that IIT drilled into me, the instinct to break a complex problem into its components and reason through each one systematically, that served me more reliably than any policing manual I ever read. I am not saying everyone must be an engineer. I am saying that kind of structured reasoning needs to become the baseline expectation for a police officer, not a happy accident when an IITian wanders into the service. The first thing that must change is how we select. Right now, we test memory, language, and general awareness. We need to also test judgment under ambiguity, because that is what the job demands every single day. The second thing is specialisation. We cannot keep producing officers who are supposed to know everything and end up masters of nothing. Cyber, counterterrorism, border management, organised crime, these need to be serious career tracks, not weekend workshops. The third, which I feel most strongly about, is moral formation. The officer of 2045 will face situations no rule book anticipated. In that moment, all he has is his character. We spend enormous energy testing his knowledge. We spend almost no time building his character. That is the gap I would close first, because everything else can be taught. Character must be cultivated, and it must start early.
Furthermore, we must address the incredibly rapid pace of technological change. The transformations that once took 100 years now happen in just 10. Looking ahead 21 years to 2047, we will witness revolutions equivalent to two centuries of past progress. Just as the internet, computers, and social media fundamentally altered global society and policing over the last 30 to 40 years, the coming decades will bring massive shifts driven by AI and emerging fields like quantum computing. The very nature of warfare has already shifted away from manual combat to missiles and drones, and the landscape of crime and law and order will transform just as radically. People are operating increasingly in the online space rather than the physical one, rapidly accelerating the scale of cyber crime. The police must actively keep upgrading themselves to match this technological curve. Historically, police forces have lagged years behind technology—just as criminals once used fast cars while police chased them in old jeeps until the forces finally acquired high-speed vehicles. We cannot afford this gap. Governments and finance departments need to adequately fund the police so they can match the technological capabilities of modern criminals. Moving forward, our manpower requirements and training programs must evolve continuously right alongside these technological advancements.
Seema Sanghosh English: May 2026
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