Painting civil society organisations as anti-national is not new for illiberal regimes. What is new, is the attempt to raise the confrontation between the State and civil society to the level of “war” by India’s National Security Advisor (NSA).
In his speech to Indian Police Service probationers at their graduation parade at the National Police Academy, NSA Ajit Doval claimed, “The new frontiers of war, what you call the fourth generation warfare, is civil society.” Wars, he claimed, had become ineffective instruments of achieving political goals because they were costly and their outcomes uncertain, but civil society could be “subverted, suborned,
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