Are there more or less terrorism events since the rise of Modi’s government in power?

In May 2019, Narendra Modi’s BJP government entered a second term, after winning majority seats in 17th Parliamentary elections. Following the victory, the BJP enacted a controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill that seeks to exclude many Muslims living in the country, which it claims are illegal immigrants. This led to an increase in protests around the country, and many have started to question the government’s constitutional commitment to secularism. But BJP’s Hindu-majority nationalist stance is not new. BJP rose to power in 2014 in the aftermath of numerous prominent terrorist events, and amidst the expectation of enhanced security policies (Desai 2014). The Modi government since then has taken a number of policy measures in an effort to curb terrorism. In this paper, I will examine how these security policies have influenced the level of terrorist violence in the country. A strong counter-terrorism approach raises costs for potential perpetrators. Yet, limiting political space for minorities can have the opposite effect. Using district-level data before and after the formation of the BJP government, this paper compares the effect of BJP policies on terrorist attacks by three types of terrorist groups in India, ethno-nationalist groups, Islamist groups, and the Maoists. To control for the confounding factors, it will use the difference-in-difference method, comparing the effect of BJP policy on districts with varying degrees of the minority population. Preliminary results indicate that the rise of BJP government has caused a substantial increase in terrorist activities by Islamist and nationalist groups, mainly in districts that have higher minority population.

Data Analysis

Blue dots in the following figure shows terrorism events from 2010 to 2013 (4 years before the elections) and the red crosses are terrorism events from 2014 to 2018 (five years since the elections). While the number of events seem to have increased over the years, as indicated by dense crosses, the figure does not classify the events perpetrated by groups. These are terrorism by “all” groups.

In the following, we categorize the terrorist events by group types. The figure includes terrorist events perpetrated only by leftist and Islamist groups only. All other events, such as those perpetrated by nationalist, Hindu or unknown groups are excluded.The dense concentration of crosses in the mid- and north-east regions show that these events have substantively increased in these regions, and are concentrated in specific areas.

Excluding the two groups (leftist and Islamist), there are a number of terrorist events perpetrated by nationalist groups, a small but growing number of events by Hindu nationalists and a large number of events which are unclaimed by any groups. The following two figures includes all terrorist events except for the leftist and Islamist groups. While the figure on the right includes “Unkown” events, the figure on the left excludes such events.