Like many other countries, India has embarked on systemic deradicalisation programs over the past few years as part of its counter-terrorism thinking. Pushed through by the central government, some Indian states (policing is a state subject) have started their own deradicalisation programs, with pro-Islamic State (IS) cases pushing through the need for more holistic approaches to counter such threats of terrorism and ideological radicalisation.
The Indian state of Maharashtra, with a population of 112 million people, and the state of Kerala, with a population of 35 million, started the initial designs of their deradicalisation programs around 2016. While deradicalisation programs have been much debated, discussed and dissected in Western discourse, in India they mostly operate under the veil of a ‘national security’ argument, in which extremely restricted information flows and next to no public access to data on such issues exists, making studying the various moving parts of a deradicalisation program difficult.
Read more at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology
