Internal Security Scaled New Heights Under Rajnath

Rajnath Singh rose from a swayamsevak in the RSS to the cheif minister of Uttar pradesh, and also served as a cabinet minister in the Vajpayee government. Jailed during the Emergency, Singh was the president of the BJP’s youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha. A two-team president of the BJP, Singh ensured the elevation of Narendra Modi as the party’s prime ministeial candidate and delivered BJP’s biggest-ever electoral victory in 2014. since then, as India’s home minister, he has ushered in a new phase in the country’s security, where both internal and external threats have been minimized.

- Gautam Chintamani

When Rajnath Singh took over as the home minister of India, the general approach of the ministry was to try and cope rather than get on top of things. The ‘will cope’ attitude had invariably become the standard way of handling things largely because of the lag between intention and action. Under Singh, the MHA shifted gears to ‘resolve’ things as opposed to ‘managing’ them. This has been the approach of the Modi government across various ministries. Since 2014, the government has initiated new measures and schemes, tweaked the already existing ones and streamlined delivery mechanisms.

The Change in the overall approach towards internal and external security concerns of India, initiated by the government, were visible in a number of cases through 2017-18. As a policy the government has given security forces a free hand to engage with the enemy, be it within the geographical border or beyond, as long as the protocol is followed. Singh told the forces in Kashmir to not be the first to engage, but if it came to action to not count their bullets while retaliating. Compared to the corresponding period of the previous year, there was a 45 percent decrease in cross-border infiltration from Pakistan over a six-month period. The message had gone across that response was going to be swift and unforgiving and that India would no longer be pushed around.