Description

India’s battle with terrorism has been a long and hard one. A country with complex socio economic situation, terrorism has plagued the country since Independence.The media discourse however has always centered around terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir and has neglected to highlight the the real hot bed of terrorism in India, the North east insurgency. This analysis will attempt to highlight the extremism in the north eastern part of India.

Terrorism in India

leaflet(terror.ind.recent) %>%
  addTiles('http://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/dark_all/{z}/{x}/{y}.png') %>%
  addCircles(color="#ffa500")

In a country as diverse as India, conflicts are common and each region has its own struggles with the Indian state. Jammu and Kashmir has been in limelight for cross border terrorism but as the map suggests, the real hot bed for insurgency is in the north east and central parts of India. Various organizations such as the Maoists, Naxalites, ULFA, PWG etc.. have been waging a war against the Indian state. It is beyond the scope of this data set to analyze the complex scenarios that have led to extremism in these regions but I will attempt to highlight some of the trends.

terror.ind.max <-
  terror.ind.recent  %>% group_by(provstate, region,iyear) %>% summarise(
  attacks = sum(success),
  lat = max(latitude),
  lon = max(longitude)
  ) %>% mutate(rnk = dense_rank(desc(attacks))) 

ggplot(terror.ind.max)+aes(iyear,attacks)+geom_line(color="firebrick")+stat_smooth()+facet_wrap(~region)+theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust=0.5,face="bold"))+labs(title="Terrorist attacks by region in India",x="Year",y="total number of attacks")

East and north seem to have had more attacks than any other region. The number of attacks follow no trend in these two regions and there have been highs and lows. The central region however has seen a rise in the number of attacks from 2000. It would be interesting to see the factors attributed to this raise.

Which terror organization poses the most threat?

set.seed(1492) 

l <- layout.fruchterman.reingold(net, niter=5000, area=vcount(net)^10*10)

plot(net,  layout=l,
     edge.arrow.size=.5, 
     vertex.label.cex=0.75, 
     vertex.label.family="Helvetica",
     vertex.label.font=2,
     vertex.shape="circle", 
     vertex.size=30, 
     vertex.label.color="black", 
     edge.width=0.5)

legend(x=-1.5, y=-1.1, c("Extremists","Southern","Eastern", "Northern","Western","Central"), pch=21,
       col="#777777", pt.bg=colrs, pt.cex=2, cex=.8, bty="n", ncol=1)

From the network visualization it is clear that the biggest threat to security of India is from home grown terror groups such as Naxalites and Maoists (they maybe be funded by foreign elements). Terrorism through foreign groups such as Let, JeM are contained in Jammu and Kashmir and have not spread through much of India.

Central region

Who have been targeted by the extremists?

  require(d3Network)
  sankeyNetwork(
  Links = links.central,
  Nodes = nodes.central,
  Source = "from",
  Target = "to",
  Value = "weight",
  NodeID = "name",
  nodeWidth = 50,
  fontSize = 14
  )

The intent of Naxalites and Maoists is to paralyze the state machinery and cause public damage. We can see from the visualization that these groups target state officers and state property

How do these groups attack?

  wordcloud(terror.ind.central$attacktype1_txt,
          max.words = 100,
          random.order = FALSE)

North East Region

The north east is a series of small tribal states that have been having several conflicts with the Indian state. Factors such as poverty, lack of infrastructure, unemployment and illiteracy have contributed to rapid raise in extremism. The issues that plague these states go long back in history and there is a general feeling among the north eastern people that the Indian state neglects their concerns.

terror.ind.east <-
  terror.ind.recent %>% filter(region == "Eastern" &
  gname != "Unknown")
  
leaflet(terror.ind.east) %>% addTiles('http://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/dark_all/{z}/{x}/{y}.png') %>%
  addCircles(color = "firebrick")

North east is a hot bed for terrorism with more than 100 insurgent groups.

  ggplot(terror.east.top) + aes(terror.abbr, success) + geom_boxplot(fill =
  "firebrick") + labs(title = "Major insurgent groups in the north east", x =
  "Organization name", "total attacks") + theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust =
  0.4, face = "bold"))

Moaists are the biggest group operating in this region. It is clear that they have had more success in their insurgency than any other groups.

** Who are the targets for these groups?**

wordcloud(terror.ind.east$targtype1_txt,
max.words = 100,
random.order = FALSE)

Summary: Terrorism in India is multi faceted but the main stream news media rarely covers the terrorism happening in the north east and central India. The national discourse is directed towards stopping extremism in the northern region. The insurgency in north east is a bigger threat to the security of the Indian state and government must work to resolve the issues that plague this region.