Building the foundation for a new generation

Not so long ago, news of a terror attack in an Indian city barely surprised anyone, because it had happened before and seemed likely to happen again. One year it was Delhi, the next Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad or Mumbai. Television showed the same images: twisted vehicles, crowded hospitals, relatives searching for the missing. For Indians who came of age in the 2000s, this was the background noise of growing up. Terrorism was not a distant border problem. It had reached the markets, trains and streets of ordinary life.

For millennials, those years are lived memory. For much of Gen Z, they are a documentary or a story told by parents. That gap matters, because every generation judges its country by what it has experienced. What feels routine to one may be the hard-won result of sacrifice and difficult choices for another.

The early 2000s were hopeful and fragile at once. The economy was opening up and the middle class was dreaming bigger. Yet the 2001 attack on Parliament, the 2006 Mumbai train blasts and the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, which claimed 166 lives, exposed deep gaps in the country’s security architecture. The 2008 assault put cross-border terrorism on the global radar and raised hard questions about intelligence coordination and coastal defence.

Reform followed. The National Investigation Agency was set up in 2008, and intelligence sharing and coastal security were strengthened. These steps did not end the danger. The Pune German Bakery blast in 2010, the Mumbai serial explosions of 2011 and the twin blasts in Hyderabad in 2013 showed that terror networks could still strike.

The lesson was plain: reacting well after an attack was not enough. India needed to detect plots early, dismantle the networks behind them and treat terrorism as an ecosystem of people, money and infrastructure rather than a string of isolated incidents.

After 2014, the Modi government built its security policy around zero tolerance for terror, with closer intelligence coordination, pre-emptive action, tighter investigations and a crackdown on terror financing. The aim was to neutralise threats before they turned into bloodshed.

Its stance on cross-border terrorism also hardened. The 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot air strike showed a readiness to respond militarily to major attacks. Counterterrorism became tied more openly to deterrence, and the message was that terror would now carry costs well beyond diplomatic protest.

Set against the 2000s, the change is visible. The serial bombings that repeatedly rocked India’s big cities have become far rarer. Terrorism has not vanished, and threats in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere demand constant alertness. Still, the distance from that earlier decade is significant.

Gen Z feels this in everyday life. Commuting to college, riding the metro, strolling through a mall, attending a concert or booking a holiday all rest, in part, on a sense that public places are safe. Few people think about the institutions that make this possible. For a generation raised amid widening opportunity, planning a future without bracing for the next big attack can feel normal. But that confidence is neither automatic nor guaranteed.

Security and development are also bound together. Factories need secure supply chains, tourism needs public trust, and digital payments need defences against cyber threats. National security is not separate from development; it is one of the conditions that allows development to continue.

The past decade has brought a major expansion of highways, airports, railways and digital public infrastructure. UPI has transformed everyday payments. Their durability depends on the state’s ability to protect critical infrastructure and respond to new threats.

That link grows stronger as India aims to become a developed nation by 2047. Building creates opportunity; protecting what has been built allows it to last. India’s success will be judged not only by how much it builds, but by how well it safeguards it.

India’s standing in the world tells a similar story. In the 2000s, major attacks repeatedly put its security weaknesses under the global spotlight. Today its international role spans economic partnerships, technology cooperation and diplomacy, and its 2023 G20 presidency offered a prominent stage for that growing role. Influence abroad draws on economic and technological strength, but credibility rests on a country’s ability to protect its people and interests.

For young people raised on digital payments, new infrastructure and widening horizons, all of this can look like progress taking its natural course. It is not. The security environment in which a country grows is neither automatic nor permanent. It depends on policy choices, institutional strength and the unrelenting work of those entrusted with protecting the nation. India’s counterterrorism journey has been shaped by reforms and security institutions across successive governments. Since 2014, the Modi government’s focus on stronger capabilities, preventive action and a more assertive strategic posture has become a defining feature of it. Holding on to these gains demands sustained vigilance, because terrorist networks keep adapting.

As India heads towards 2047, today’s young will inherit both the opportunities development has created and the duty to preserve the conditions behind them.

For millennials, the fears of the 2000s are lived experience. For many in Gen Z, they are fast becoming history.

Real progress is not a generation that has forgotten fear, but one with the confidence to dream beyond it. For those spared the anxieties of their elders, understanding the journey from vulnerability to resilience is the surest way to value the peace they have inherited.

Aradhita Singh is a Research Fellow at India Foundation, New Delhi, specialising in internal and national security; Views presented are personal.