India’s national security curriculum is dangerously outdated — still teaching traditional threats while silent enemies multiply across climate, cyber, health, and information domains. This book discussion argues that it’s time to fundamentally expand how India defines and plans for national security.
The author makes the case that non-traditional threats — climate change, food and water insecurity, narratives warfare, geo-economics — are deeply interconnected, yet India’s policy establishment treats them in silos. Climate disruption leads to food shortages, which collapse education systems, which erode social cohesion, which creates security vacuums. The chain is well-documented here.
The book is positioned as essential reading for national security curricula in Indian universities, and the panellists call on the National Security Council to codify a broader threat framework before the next crisis catches the country unprepared.

About the speakers:
Dr. Arvind Gupta has been the director of the New Delhi-based Vivekananda International Foundation since October 2017. A former diplomat, He previously served as the deputy NSA and headed the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, a think tank under the Ministry of Defence. Dr. Gupta specialised in national security and foreign policy and is a frequent speaker on these subjects. He has authored five books and edited several others.

Rajesh Singh is the author of ‘Sikh Separatism, ‘Iconic Indian'(Co-authored with Sanjeev Sanyal), and several others. He has worked as a journalist for over two decades in Goa and Delhi, and also served as a media advisor to the former Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar. He regularly writes articles in popular forums.

Debasis Sarkar is an Anchor at The Sangam Talks and an independent researcher in Indology.