Inter-country and also intra-country unrest seem to be going out of hands threatening national security and citizens’ safety in ways and on a scale like never before in human history. Human kind has progressed in a negative sense, at a slow rate for many centuries and rapidly in modern times, given the use of clubs, spears, swords, arrows and crude canons in wars yielding place to use of guns, explosives, missiles and remote-controlled weaponry in wars, ostensibly to decimate rivals in the world of economic competition. The recent episode of mutual challenges posed by the United States of America and North Korea, pushing both to the brink of war, maybe, a third world war, to witness mass scale fatalities of people at large. The columns of the various dailies in different languages are replete with reports featuring wars of words among the land’s political class, different sections of society on a multitude of counts in a long list including clamour for superiority of respective faith, caste, language and so on.

Ideally, the nation has no concern of its security if not even one out of the 1.35 billion mass has reason to feel unsafe both within the four walls of homes and in the open. Accordingly, a broad definition of security of a country draws its essence as the well-being of all its citizens.

Narratives in the pages of the land’s history, particularly highlight the disharmony among the kings and chieftains giving an open invitation to Mughals first and the British later for taking control of what was described as the Indian sub-continent. If the Mughals used their superior might to vanquish the rulers of their territories, the British are known to have successfully applied the divide ‘n’ rule policy to keep the masses at their command.

The lessons of the land’s history spanning four centuries of rule by aliens doesn’t seem to have aroused both the ruling class and the land’s people at large to safeguard themselves from a repeat of the past. Stakeholders of the nation’s integrity as well as their own safety, namely the people seem to be undoing the contribution of the stockholders of the country’s security, namely the armed forces and the Police force.

The factor of discord between the successive governments and the people comprising a multitude of outfits pursuing all sorts of causes by staging violent protests across the land all through the year with cohesion as a casualty is bound to worsen the security-safety scene of the nation in days ahead.