Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said on Monday that the past two decades had seen the gap between internal and external security narrowing and independent media, the judiciary, NGOs and the a country’s vibrant democracy could be misused to destroy its security.
Addressing the second convocation of Rashtriya Raksha University in Lavad village in Gandhinagar district of Gujarat, Singh also stressed the need for state agencies to work in an integrated manner.
With the changing times, there has been a huge shift in the dimensions of security, he said. ”We usually see security in two aspects – internal and external. But the past two decades have seen the gap between internal and external security narrowing,” Singh said.
“In hybrid warfare, the boundaries between internal and external security almost disappear,” he said.
The Minister of Defense said that a country’s social media, NGOs, justice system and democracy can be misused by forces seeking to destroy its security. ”Independent social media can be used to carry out systematic propaganda. Social media freedom is not bad, media should be free, but if 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 NGOs are free, efforts are made to use them in such a way that the whole system of the country is paralyzed,” Singh said. “If the judiciary is free, efforts are made to use it to stop or slow down development work using the judiciary. If a country has a vibrant democracy, then efforts are made to infiltrate political parties to attack its unity and security,” he said.
These are not mere imaginations, but the words of strategists and are detailed in some countries’ security documents, he said.
Singh also used the example of some media who said that 50% of tweets related to the Koregaon-Bhima (in the Pune district of Maharashtra in 2018) violence came from Pakistan.
(This story has not been edited by the Devdiscourse team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
