A 2026 analysis of India's conflict history — casualties, key actors, and full timeline.
India’s conflict history continued in 2024 with 552 fatalities from organized political violence, concentrated in two theatres. In central India, state-based fighting between the Indian government and the Maoist (Naxalite) insurgency escalated, with most deaths in Chhattisgarh. In Kashmir, territorial violence between Indian forces and Kashmiri insurgents continued, causing 112 fatalities — slightly fewer than 2023. Non-state violence fell sharply over the year, while one-sided violence against civilians edged up, mainly involving the same two actors. India’s long-running civil-war context remained active.
In 2025, India’s conflict deaths arose mainly from the Maoist (Naxalite) insurgency, fighting in Kashmir, and a brief armed confrontation with Pakistan. UCDP recorded 623 battle-related deaths, including 112 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand India’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
A note on borders. India’s outline on a map is not a settled fact but a live dispute. The former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, in the far north, is divided by a military ceasefire line between India and Pakistan and claimed in whole by both; a further slice of it, Aksai Chin, is held by China but claimed by India, while China in turn claims much of the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. This document treats India’s territory as it is actually administered today, while noting throughout where a boundary is contested rather than fixed.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
India occupies most of a vast peninsula — the Indian subcontinent — walled off from the rest of Asia by the Himalaya, the highest mountain range on Earth, and bounded on its other three sides by the sea. Within that frame lives extraordinary diversity: hundreds of languages, every major world religion, and regional cultures shaped by river plains, deserts, and coastline. The mainstream account treats Indian history as a long experiment in holding this diversity together under successive unifying orders — ancient empires, Islamic sultanates, the Mughal Empire, British colonial rule, and finally a modern constitutional republic — each of which layered new authority over what came before rather than erasing it. Independence in 1947 arrived with a paradox: a territory of enormous religious and linguistic variety, freshly partitioned along religious lines into India and Pakistan, was expected by many outside observers to fracture further. Instead, under a written constitution and a federal structure that devolved real power to its states, it became the world’s largest democracy. Historians see in this the through-line of Indian history: not the imposition of sameness, but the repeated, unfinished project of governing difference within one political roof.
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007); Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (1997); Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (1985).
Five thresholds are generally treated as having remade the subcontinent’s structure. The rise of large territorial empires — most notably the Mauryan empire under the emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE — first showed that most of the subcontinent could be governed as a single political unit, and left behind an enduring ideal of pan-Indian rule. The establishment of the Mughal Empire from 1526 fused Persian-Islamic statecraft with a Hindu-majority population, producing centuries of syncretic culture, administration, and art. British conquest, completed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dismantled Mughal authority, subordinated the economy to imperial needs, and simultaneously built the railways, courts, and English-language administration that would later carry the idea of a single India. Independence and Partition in 1947 severed the subcontinent along religious lines into India and Pakistan, in the largest and most violent mass migration of the twentieth century. The turn to economic liberalisation in 1991, opening a long-protected economy to global trade and investment, then reshaped India’s place in the world a second time. Each threshold changed who held power, how the economy ran, and what “India” was understood to mean.
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007); Judith M. Brown, Modern India (1985).
The mainstream account draws a sharp and deliberate distinction between state and nation. The administrative state — courts, railways, a unified bureaucracy, a single legal system — was substantially built by the British in the nineteenth century to govern their Indian empire efficiently, not to create a nation. The nation, by contrast, was argued into being afterward, by the anti-colonial movement led chiefly by the Indian National Congress, which under leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru built a shared political identity out of the shared experience of colonial rule itself, rather than out of a single language, religion, or ethnicity. On this account the binding agent was civic and constitutional: a commitment, enshrined in the 1950 constitution, to secularism, universal suffrage, and federal power-sharing among linguistically defined states. The state, in other words, substantially preceded the nation, and the nation it built was deliberately plural by design — a wager that democratic citizenship, not shared identity, could hold so varied a population together. Kashmir’s disputed accession in 1947 is treated as the wager’s most severe and unresolved test case.
Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (1997); Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007).
The long-term force most often named in the mainstream account is the repeated management of diversity through layered, rather than replacing, systems of rule. Successive orders — Mauryan, Mughal, British, and finally democratic-constitutional — each absorbed the plurality they inherited instead of flattening it, adding new institutions on top of old social and regional patterns rather than erasing them. Under British rule this habit of accommodation was interrupted by direct subordination to imperial interest; independent India revived it deliberately, building a federal, multilingual, multi-religious democracy explicitly designed to manage difference rather than dissolve it. What best explains India’s long-run trajectory, on this reading, is this recurring choice — made by very different rulers across two thousand years — to govern an irreducibly plural land through accommodation and layered authority rather than through enforced uniformity, and the political engineering, sometimes successful and sometimes not, that choice has continually required.
Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (1997); Judith M. Brown, Modern India (1985); Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the idea of India as a pre-existing civilisation simply governed, in turn, by different rulers, and argues instead that many of the categories treated as ancient and natural — rigid caste divisions, sharply bounded religious communities — were substantially hardened, and in some respects produced, by colonial rule itself. The historian Nicholas Dirks argues that caste, while it had genuine roots in older social practice, became the single, all-explaining category for understanding Indian society specifically through British census-taking, ethnographic surveying, and administrative classification in the nineteenth century — a modern colonial artefact mistaken, ever since, for an unchanging inheritance from ancient scripture. Alongside this, the Subaltern Studies historians insist that ordinary peasants and labourers possessed their own independent political consciousness, visible in repeated uprisings, rather than merely following the lead of elite nationalist politicians. This is a reweighing of known events rather than an invention of new ones — the uprisings, the censuses, and the caste system itself are not in dispute — but how much of “traditional” India these processes actually created, as opposed to merely reorganised, remains genuinely argued over.
Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983).
The revisionist backbone keeps the same run of turning points the mainstream account uses — ancient empire, Mughal rule, British conquest, Partition, liberalisation — but rereads several of them as acts of construction rather than neutral unfolding. Colonial census operations from the 1870s onward are treated not as a passive count of an existing population but as the moment fluid, overlapping social identities were sorted into fixed, mutually exclusive boxes of caste and religion, with lasting political consequences. The peasant revolts that punctuate the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — studied in detail by Ranajit Guha — are read as autonomous political action in their own right, carrying their own logic of rebellion, rather than as inarticulate precursors waiting for educated nationalist leadership to give them meaning. Partition itself, on this reading, drew force from those same hardened colonial categories of religious identity, turning administrative classifications into the fault line of a catastrophic division. Because this rereads accepted events rather than denying them, it counts as legitimate scholarship — but critics note it risks understating real, older distinctions of caste, region, and faith that predate colonial rule and that the empire inherited rather than invented outright.
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (2001).
Where the mainstream account credits the Indian National Congress with forging a shared civic nation out of the anti-colonial struggle, the political theorist Partha Chatterjee argues the process was narrower and more contested than that story allows. Chatterjee describes anti-colonial nationalists as having split their society into a “material” domain — economy, statecraft, technology — where they largely accepted Western models, and a “spiritual” domain — religion, caste, the family — which they claimed as an inner sanctuary of authentic identity, untouched by colonial rule, well before they ever contested political power directly. The nation that emerged, on this account, was substantially defined and led by an educated, largely upper-caste middle class, which spoke for peasants, women, and lower-caste communities more than it was shaped by them. The state, built on British administrative foundations, and the nation, imagined chiefly by this middle-class elite, therefore formed together but unevenly — with the interests and self-understanding of subordinated groups folded into a nationalist story substantially written by others. This does not deny that a broad nationalist movement existed; it argues about whose vision of the nation actually prevailed within it.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (2001).
The force this school foregrounds is the colonial production of rigid social categories, and the uneven, elite-mediated nationalist response built on top of them. On this account, the deepest driver of modern Indian history is not simply a plural civilisation being governed in turn by different rulers, but the specific administrative work of colonial classification — census, survey, and law — which took a genuinely diverse but more fluid society and sorted it into the fixed communities of caste and religion that have structured Indian politics ever since. Anti-colonial nationalism then formed partly in response to, and partly by absorbing, those same categories, with an educated middle class claiming the right to define the nation’s inner, “spiritual” identity while leaving colonial administrative structures largely intact underneath. This is a materialist and post-colonial account, and it departs deliberately from readings that treat India’s plurality as an unchanging inheritance simply managed anew by each ruling order; its contested edge is exactly how much of that plurality colonial rule sharpened, and how much was already there for it to sharpen.
Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (2001); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (1993); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through religion and identity, India is above all a civilisation shaped by Hinduism — the subcontinent’s oldest major religious tradition, encompassing an enormous range of belief and practice bound loosely by shared texts, deities, and the idea of dharma, or right conduct — layered over many centuries with Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity. For a millennium after the arrival of Islamic rule in the medieval period, and especially under the Mughal Empire, Hindu-majority society and Muslim rulers and communities built a genuinely composite culture — shared courtly language, architecture, music, and daily life — alongside real and recurring friction. This lens reads Indian history as the long, unfinished argument over what that layered identity actually adds up to: a pluralist, composite civilisation that absorbs difference, as most nationalist leaders at independence insisted, or a fundamentally Hindu civilisation that has endured successive foreign impositions — first Islamic, then British, then secular — and is now reclaiming its own definition, as the modern movement known as Hindutva, or “Hindu-ness,” argues. Both readings draw on the same religious history; they disagree fundamentally about what it means for the nation.
Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (2007); Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (1994).
The turning points, read through faith and identity, track a recurring cycle of religious reform and political mobilisation. Sultanate and then Mughal rule from the thirteenth century established deep and lasting religious plurality, producing both syncretic culture and periodic communal tension. Hindu reform and revivalist movements of the nineteenth century, responding to both colonial modernity and Christian missionary activity, began articulating a self-consciously Hindu political identity for the first time in modern form. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement — a campaign asserting that a mosque in the town of Ayodhya stood on the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram — culminated in the mosque’s demolition by a mob in 1992, a watershed that mainstreamed religious nationalism in electoral politics. The subsequent rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu-nationalist party, to become India’s dominant political force under Narendra Modi, first elected prime minister in 2014, marks the most recent threshold: religious identity moving from the margins to the centre of national politics, and secularism itself becoming a contested rather than settled constitutional value.
Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (2007); Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (2002).
On this reading, a religiously and culturally rooted sense of identity long predates the modern Indian state, and the central drama of national formation is the contest over which version of that identity the nation should express. One vision, associated chiefly with Jawaharlal Nehru and the early Congress leadership, defined the nation in civic and secular terms: a state neutral among religions, binding citizens through constitutional rights rather than shared faith. A rival vision, articulated from the 1920s onward and known as Hindutva, defined the nation as fundamentally Hindu in character, treating minority religions as guests within a civilisation whose core identity is Hindu. These two visions did not simply succeed one another; both were present at independence, and the argument between them has structured Indian politics ever since, from the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who viewed him as too accommodating toward Muslims, to the BJP’s rise to dominant power today. The state that formed in 1947 committed constitutionally to the secular vision; the argument over whether the nation itself agrees remains unresolved.
Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (2007); Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism (1994).
The enduring force this lens identifies is the unresolved contest between a pluralist, composite idea of Indian identity and a majoritarian religious nationalism, each claiming to speak for what India truly is. For over a century, waves of religious reform, communal mobilisation, and political organising have pulled in one direction or the other — sometimes toward an inclusive nationalism that treats India’s religious diversity as its defining strength, sometimes toward a narrower nationalism that treats Hindu identity as the nation’s essential core, with other communities positioned as historical latecomers. Neither vision has ever fully displaced the other; each has commanded state power at different moments and has shaped law, education, and public memory accordingly. What best explains India’s cultural and political trajectory over the long run, on this account, is this recurring, still-unsettled argument over the relationship between religion and nationhood — a contest research on communal violence shows is not fixed by history but actively shaped by present-day civic organisation and political choice.
Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life (2002); Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (2007).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
The shape of the land and its weather explain a great deal of India’s history. The subcontinent depends on the annual monsoon — a seasonal reversal of winds that brings the bulk of a year’s rainfall in a few concentrated months — and on the great river systems of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, whose plains have supported some of the densest agrarian populations on Earth for millennia. That agricultural surplus financed early states, cities, and long-distance trade, while India’s position astride the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean made it, for well over a thousand years before European colonisation, one of the world’s central hubs of commerce — its cotton textiles and spices sought from East Africa to Southeast Asia. This same wealth is what drew European trading companies to its shores from the sixteenth century onward, and it was commercial ambition, more than religious or political mission, that first brought the British East India Company to India’s coasts. On this reading, geography and agrarian abundance made India rich and central to world trade long before they made it, briefly, a colonial possession.
Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (2018); Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–2010 (2011).
Read through resources and trade, the decisive thresholds are economic ones. For centuries, monsoon-fed agriculture across the river plains supported large populations and revenue-rich states, and Indian textile manufacturing supplied a substantial share of world trade. British colonial rule, consolidated through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reversed this position: colonial policy favoured British manufactured imports over Indian textiles, contributing to a marked decline of local industry, while infrastructure such as the railway network — built at considerable cost — was designed chiefly to move raw materials to ports and troops across the territory, not to promote balanced Indian development. Repeated and severe famines under colonial administration, worsened by export-oriented food policy, are treated by economic historians as a further mark of this extractive relationship. After independence, a state-planned economy focused on self-sufficiency and heavy industry through the mid-twentieth century; the sweeping liberalisation of 1991, which dismantled much of that planning framework and opened India to global trade and capital, then produced the services- and technology-led growth of recent decades. Each threshold is measurable in acreage, trade volumes, tariffs, and industrial output.
Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–2010 (2011); David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (1999).
On this reading, geography sorted the subcontinent into distinct regional economies — the wheat-growing Indus and upper Gangetic plains, the rice-growing river deltas, the drier Deccan plateau, and the trading coastlines — long before any single political authority bound them together. The historian David Ludden argues that South Asia is better understood as a patchwork of agrarian regions, each with its own social and political history, than as one uniform territory awaiting unification. Colonial rule imposed a new, artificial economic unity over this patchwork: a single currency, a connected railway grid, and shared commercial law integrated these regions into one market for the first time, primarily to serve imperial extraction. Indian nationalists then inherited and repurposed that same colonial economic infrastructure as evidence that the subcontinent already functioned as one nation. State formation, in other words, rode on an economic integration built for entirely different purposes, and the regional economic disparities that geography originally produced — between industrialised and agrarian states, prosperous and famine-prone regions — persist as a live source of federal tension today.
David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (1999); Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters (2018).
The long-term force this lens identifies is the recurring attempt to bind a geographically and agriculturally diverse subcontinent into a single economic system — an attempt made, in turn, by monsoon-dependent regional states, colonial administrators serving imperial trade, and a modern government pursuing first planned self-sufficiency and then global integration. Geography set the terms: a land of rich but uneven river plains, a monsoon that can fail catastrophically, and a peninsula positioned astride major trade routes, all of which rewarded whichever power could organise it as one connected system. Colonial rule achieved a version of that unity through railways, currency, and law, but organised it to extract rather than to develop; independent India inherited that same infrastructure and has spent the decades since redirecting it toward domestic growth, most decisively after 1991. What best explains India’s economic trajectory over the long run, on this account, is this repeated, still-unfinished project of converting geographic and agrarian diversity into a single functioning economic whole.
Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–2010 (2011); David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (1999); Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters (2018).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The origin of India’s caste and communal categories is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings tend to treat caste hierarchy and religious community as long-standing features of Indian society — reorganised repeatedly by successive rulers, but rooted in genuinely old distinctions of scripture, practice, and region. The revisionist reading argues that the rigid, all-India, mutually exclusive form these categories now take was substantially the work of colonial census-taking and classification, which froze fluid and overlapping identities into fixed administrative boxes. Both sides agree the underlying distinctions of caste and faith are ancient; they disagree sharply about how much of their present rigidity is inheritance and how much is colonial manufacture.
Partition itself draws rival explanations from every lens. The cultural and political account traces it to a decades-long argument over whether India’s nationhood was civic or Hindu, which hardened into the competing claim that Muslims formed a separate nation altogether. The revisionist account traces it to colonial administrative categories of religious identity, sharpened by census and law, that made religious community the only available basis for drawing a border. The economic and geographic account notes that partition also severed integrated agrarian and industrial regions — Punjab’s canal-irrigated farmland, Bengal’s jute economy — overnight, adding economic catastrophe to political rupture. The consensus account treats it more narrowly as the tragic outcome of failed last-minute negotiation among Congress, the Muslim League, and a departing colonial power. Each explanation accounts for the same catastrophe; none fully displaces the others.
On one point all four perspectives agree: India’s survival as a single democratic state, given its scale and diversity, was never a foregone conclusion, and remains, in a meaningful sense, an ongoing achievement rather than a settled fact. They part sharply on what that achievement rests on — constitutional and federal design, the unfinished work of managing colonial-era categories, the outcome of a still-open contest between pluralist and majoritarian nationalism, or an economic integration inherited from an empire built to extract rather than to unite.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007); Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (1997); Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (1985); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993); Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (2007); Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (1994); Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (2002); Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–2010 (2011); David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (1999); Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters (2018). The Subaltern Studies project (Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee) and Nicholas Dirks’s account of colonial caste-formation are influential but actively contested theses within Indian historiography, and are presented here as challenges to, not replacements of, the mainstream account.
Several of the fault lines these four lenses trace remain active and unresolved as of mid-2026. In Jammu and Kashmir, the special constitutional autonomy it held under Article 370 was revoked in August 2019, and India’s Supreme Court upheld that revocation in December 2023; the territory remains split into the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with statehood restoration still promised but not yet delivered, and with tens of thousands of new domicile certificates issued to non-permanent residents since 2022 — a change critics say is reshaping who counts as a local. Relations with Pakistan sharply deteriorated after a terrorist attack killed 26 civilians at Pahalgam in Kashmir in April 2025; India responded with air and missile strikes on militant camps in Pakistan under the name Operation Sindoor, triggering a four-day military exchange before a ceasefire took hold on 10 May 2025. More than a year later, that ceasefire holds, but the underlying disputes over Kashmir and cross-border militancy remain unresolved, and new points of friction have since emerged. Along the Himalayan frontier with China, the multi-year troop standoff that followed a deadly clash in the Galwan Valley in 2020 has eased: the two sides reached a patrolling arrangement in October 2024 and completed troop disengagement at the Depsang and Demchok sectors of eastern Ladakh, with Indian officials describing roughly three-quarters of outstanding disengagement issues as resolved, though full de-escalation and a final boundary settlement remain pending. Domestically, Narendra Modi won a third term as prime minister in the 2024 general election, but his Bharatiya Janata Party lost its outright parliamentary majority for the first time in a decade and now governs through a coalition, a real check on single-party dominance. Separately, the long-running Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in central and eastern India — once active across well over a hundred districts — has by early 2026 collapsed to a handful of holdout areas in the state of Chhattisgarh, after a sustained security campaign the government says met its own March 2026 deadline for ending it, though a small remnant presence persists.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, Reuters/business and defence press coverage, Indian government press releases, Cambridge Core review literature).
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India became independent from British rule in 1947 and a republic in 1950. Partition split British India into India and Pakistan, triggering large-scale communal violence and leaving disputed areas such as Kashmir. Since then, India has brought many religions, languages, and tribal communities into one union. According to UCDP, different regional and political aspirations—especially in the northeast—have repeatedly turned into armed challenges to the state.
UCDP reports several overlapping conflicts. The deadliest in 2024 was between the Government of India and the communist CPI-Maoist, as the state intensified its campaign against “Left-Wing Extremism,” with many deaths in Chhattisgarh. Violence also continued in Kashmir between the government and Kashmir insurgents, linked to the long-running India–Pakistan dispute. In Manipur, clashes between Kuki and Meitei groups persisted, though information is limited.
In 2024, UCDP recorded 552 deaths from organized violence in India, higher than recent years, mainly due to the Maoist conflict’s escalation. One-sided violence, where armed groups target civilians, remained a concern, especially involving CPI-Maoist and Kashmir insurgents. Internationally, the Kashmir issue matters because it is tied to recurring India–Pakistan hostility, while India’s wider role as a major regional power increases attention to its internal stability.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
India pursues strategic autonomy through multi-alignment, deepening security ties with the US and Quad partners (Australia, Japan) to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, while maintaining historical defense and energy partnerships with Russia amid its Ukraine war. Despite border clashes with China, India avoids full alignment, framing Quad as inclusive rather than anti-China. It resists US pressure for complete decoupling from Russia, buying discounted oil to support economic growth. This approach positions India as a bridge in great power competition, prioritizing national interests over bloc politics, as evidenced by its G20 leadership and Global South advocacy.
Sources: CSIS, RUSI, US Defense Intelligence Agency
India maintains strategic ambiguity, abstaining from UN votes condemning Russia, refusing Western sanctions, and continuing Russian oil and arms imports, which surged post-2022 invasion for energy security. Prime Minister Modi has urged peace talks without blaming Russia, reflecting non-alignment roots and reliance on Russian weapons (over 50% of arsenal). This neutrality preserves leverage with Moscow against China while engaging Ukraine diplomatically. Critics see it as enabling aggression, but India frames it as pragmatic autonomy in a multipolar world, boosting its Global South mediator role.
Sources: CSIS, Ministry of External Affairs India, Wikipedia Foreign Relations of India
India views China as its primary adversary due to ongoing Ladakh border disputes since 2020 and Beijing’s South Asia/Indian Ocean expansion, prompting Indo-Pacific focus and Quad activism. Pakistan remains an ancillary threat via terrorism support, exacerbated by China-Pakistan alliances like CPEC. Post-‘Operation Sindoor’ in 2025, India seeks de-hyphenation from Pakistan in global views, bolstering military growth and maritime security. Neighborhood First policy falters amid SAARC stagnation, prioritizing bilateral deterrence and US partnerships without full alliances.
Sources: The Diplomat, RUSI, US Defense Intelligence Agency, FES Asia
The Indus Valley civilization, one of the world’s oldest, flourished during the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C. and extended into northwestern India. Around 1500 B.C., Aryan tribes from the northwest infiltrated the Indian subcontinent; their merger with earlier Dravidian inhabitants contributed to the development of classical Indian culture.
In the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., the Maurya Empire—reaching its zenith under Ashoka—united much of South Asia. The Gupta dynasty (4th to 6th centuries A.D.) later ushered in a “Golden Age,” marked by major advances in Indian science, art, and culture.
Islam spread across the subcontinent over a period of 700 years. In the 10th and 11th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded India and established the Delhi Sultanate.
In the early 16th century, Emperor Babur founded the Mughal Dynasty, which ruled large sections of India for more than three centuries. European explorers began establishing footholds in India during the 16th century.
By the 19th century, Great Britain had become the dominant political power on the subcontinent, and India was known as the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire. The British Indian Army played a vital role in both World Wars.
Years of nonviolent resistance to British rule, led by Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, culminated in Indian independence in 1947. Large-scale communal violence occurred before and after the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the two countries have fought three wars since independence; the last, in 1971, resulted in East Pakistan becoming the separate nation of Bangladesh.
Modern India has been shaped by three pivotal developments — the 1998 nuclear weapons tests, the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, and the 1991 economic reforms that powered its emergence as a regional power. India’s 1998 nuclear weapons tests prompted Pakistan to conduct its own tests the same year. In 2008, terrorists originating from Pakistan carried out coordinated attacks in Mumbai, India’s financial capital.
India’s economic growth after reforms in 1991, along with a massive youth population and strategic geographic location, has supported its emergence as a regional and global power. However, India continues to face extensive poverty, widespread corruption, and environmental degradation, while a restrictive business climate challenges expectations for economic growth.
UCDP data shows multiple conflict tracks rather than a single nationwide war. The Government of India is in state-based conflict with the CPI-Maoist insurgency, with Kashmir insurgents, and with UNLFW-linked armed groups. Separately, UCDP records non-state fighting between Hindus and Muslims, and between Kuki and Meitei. These patterns point to different local drivers—insurgency and separatism in some areas, and identity-based or community tensions in others.
Civilians are harmed in several ways: through crossfire and operations in state-based conflicts, and through deliberate targeting. UCDP records 14 civilian deaths as collateral in state-based fighting. It also records 85 deaths from one-sided violence, including 6 attributed to the Government of India and 79 attributed to non-state groups, with CPI-Maoist, Kashmir insurgents, and PLFI listed as perpetrators. Even when fatalities are low in some clashes, fear and displacement can still be severe.
The actors in the data indicate that violence is geographically and politically fragmented. Fighting with CPI-Maoist reflects a rural insurgency dynamic, while conflict with Kashmir insurgents is tied to separatist contestation and heavy security presence. UNLFW points to an additional insurgent arena in the northeast. Non-state conflicts like Hindu–Muslim violence and Kuki–Meitei clashes are different again, often spreading through community networks and reprisals. For civilians, this means risks vary sharply by location and by the armed actors present.
Sources: UCDP data.
Indian authorities conduct counterinsurgency operations against multiple armed groups. UCDP records both collateral civilian deaths in state-based fighting and deliberate one-sided killings attributed to government forces, alongside broader civilian harm linked to security operations.
The CPI-Maoist is a left-wing insurgent group opposing the Indian state. UCDP records one-sided violence by the group against civilians, indicating a pattern of targeted killings and coercion alongside attacks on state forces.
Armed groups described in UCDP as Kashmir insurgents fight the Indian government in a separatist-oriented conflict. UCDP also records one-sided violence by these insurgents against civilians, contributing to persistent insecurity beyond battlefield deaths.
UNLFW refers to a coalition associated with armed activity in India’s northeast, opposing the central state. In this dataset segment, it is not listed among the main actors for one-sided violence against civilians, though civilians can still be affected by insecurity and spillover from attacks.
PLFI is recorded by UCDP as a perpetrator of one-sided violence against civilians in India. Even where battlefield engagements are less visible in the data, deliberate attacks on civilians and coercive control can make local areas highly dangerous.
UCDP records a non-state conflict between Hindu and Muslim actors in India. Such communal violence can involve localized armed mobilization, intimidation, and displacement, even when the number of recorded civilian deaths in this dataset segment is limited.
Muslim actors are listed by UCDP as a party in a non-state conflict with Hindu actors. Communal clashes tend to raise risks for nearby civilians through riots, arson, and reprisals, even when direct civilian-fatality totals recorded here are relatively low.
UCDP lists a non-state conflict between Kuki and Meitei actors, reflecting ethnic mobilization and local armed clashes. Even when the dataset records few civilian deaths for this segment, civilians may face displacement, property destruction, and fear during bouts of violence.
Meitei actors are recorded by UCDP as a party to non-state fighting with Kuki actors. Localized armed confrontations can expose civilians to sudden violence and reprisal dynamics, as well as longer-term disruption to livelihoods and access to services.
India’s violence landscape in UCDP reflects several overlapping internal conflicts: insurgencies against the state in different regions, alongside localized communal and ethnic fighting between non-state groups. These conflicts are driven by competing political claims, security crackdowns, and identity-based tensions that can flare into armed violence.
British India is partitioned into India and Pakistan, triggering mass violence and refugee flows. The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir accedes to India amid conflict, starting the first Indo-Pakistani war and embedding the contested status of Kashmir that still underpins insurgency and armed clashes.
India adopts a republican constitution with a strong central government and federal states. Special autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 and emergency powers for internal security shape later policies toward insurgencies, including Maoist and Kashmiri movements challenging central authority.
India and Pakistan fight a full-scale war centered on Jammu and Kashmir, ending with a UN-backed ceasefire and the Tashkent Declaration. The unresolved territorial dispute helps entrench militarization, cross-border support for insurgents, and a security-first approach that continues to frame Kashmir violence.
A peasant revolt in Naxalbari, West Bengal, inspires the Naxalite movement and later Communist Party of India (Maoist). Crackdowns and spread to tribal, forested regions lay foundations for today’s protracted Maoist insurgency, including contemporary clashes in Chhattisgarh and nearby states.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declares a national Emergency, suspending civil liberties, jailing opponents, and centralizing power. The period normalizes wide security powers and paramilitary expansion, setting patterns later used against insurgents in Kashmir and against Maoist rebels across central India.
Rigged elections and political discontent fuel a mass uprising and armed insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, with groups receiving support from across the Line of Control. Heavy militarization, civilian abuses, and militant attacks create a long-running conflict environment that persists in today’s territorial violence.
Major Naxalite groups merge to form the CPI (Maoist), creating a unified insurgent organization across India’s “Red Corridor.” The group targets security forces, infrastructure, and civilians, becoming the country’s deadliest internal threat and directly linking to current battle deaths in Chhattisgarh.
The Indian state launches large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns, informally termed Operation Green Hunt, deploying central paramilitary forces into Maoist-affected states. Operations weaken some rebel strongholds but deepen cycles of violence and militarization that underpin later escalations with CPI (Maoist).
Narendra Modi’s BJP wins power with a strong-majority government, emphasizing national security, central authority, and infrastructure in conflict zones. Policies increase pressure on Maoists and Kashmiri insurgents, shaping subsequent state-based violence patterns and security operations in border and tribal regions.
After militant attacks in Uri and other locations, India announces cross-Line-of-Control “surgical strikes” on camps in Pakistan-administered territory. Security forces intensify operations inside Jammu and Kashmir, heightening confrontation with insurgents and embedding a high-violence environment that continues, though fluctuating, today.
India revokes Article 370, ending Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and splitting it into two union territories under direct federal control. A sweeping security lockdown follows, reshaping politics while sustaining insurgent activity and counterinsurgency that now drives ongoing territorial and one-sided violence.
Security forces intensify coordinated operations in Chhattisgarh and neighboring states, targeting CPI (Maoist) leadership and strongholds. While some areas see reduced incidents, high-fatality clashes persist, entrenched by grievances over land, mining, and governance that keep Maoist-state combat a major conflict driver.
Organized violence in India causes hundreds of deaths, with Maoist conflict and Kashmir clashes leading. Non-state violence declines but one-sided attacks on civilians by insurgents and security forces continue, setting the immediate backdrop for higher 2025–2026 battle-related fatalities recorded nationwide.
From January 2025 to February 2026, hundreds die in battle-related incidents involving security forces, Maoists, and Kashmiri insurgents, including notable civilian casualties. These figures highlight the ongoing civil war context and entrenched armed confrontations that currently define India’s internal security landscape.
