Raksha Mantri Shri Rajnath Singh has called for concerted efforts of the international community to counter “grave” emerging security threats such as cyber-attacks and information warfare. He was addressing the officers of the Indian Armed Forces, Civil Services as well as from friendly foreign countries during the 60th National Defence College (NDC) course convocation ceremony in New Delhi on November 10, 2022. He termed national security as the prime focus of the Government, led by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, stressing that the full potential of the country can be tapped only when its interests are protected. Security is sine-qua-non for civilisation to flourish and prosper, he said.
Shri Rajnath Singh threw light on the narrowing gap between internal and external security and said that new dimensions of threats are being added with changing times, that are difficult to classify. He asserted that terrorism, which generally falls into internal security, is now classified in the category of external security, as training, funding and arms support of such organisations is being carried out from outside the country.
Describing the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to cyber-attacks as a big concern, the Raksha Mantri said, sectors such as energy, transport, public sector services, telecommunications, critical manufacturing industries and interconnected financial systems are prone to such threats. He was of the view that information war has the potential to threaten the political stability of a country. He pointed out that the organised use of social media and other online content generation platforms is engineering the opinion and perspective of the masses.
“The deployment of information war was most evident in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Throughout the conflict, social media has served as a battleground for both sides to spread competing narratives about the war and portray the conflict on their own terms. The propaganda campaigns as a means of strategy to shape narratives are by no means new during warfare, but its reach has increased by leaps and bounds due to the shift toward social media as the primary distribution channel,” said Shri Rajnath Singh.
