China has had a chequered relationship with India since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Beijing views India as a strategic rival and appears to consider India’s rise as an impediment to its own. The narratives, especially, convey or hint at India’s gain being China’s loss. Even though bilateral trade between the two countries has become substantial over the years and multiple linkages have been established post the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict, China still keeps India discomfited with its various overtures.

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, network centricity has profoundly transformed warfighting and the outlook of the military. The next level of the networking ladder is Internet of Things (IoT), which has already started to disruptively change the ways in the civil domain, bringing a considerable autonomy to various processes by linking of a plethora of smart devices that are talking to each other. Militaries, in the near future, are also likely to see similar proliferation of IoT, which will bring a material change to their functioning and conduct of operations.

National security refers to securing a nation’s citizens, territory, resources, assets, ideologies, institutions, and interests against threats which may emanate from changing geopolitical state of affairs, changing relations between nations, groups, races, sects, advancing technology and changing ideology. In the prevailing complex geopolitical scenario, India’s national security is facing new challenges and acquiring new dimensions with every passing year.