Aakrosh
Aakrosh is a quarterly Indian journal devoted to terrorism and internal conflicts in Asia, published in New Delhi by the Centre for Security and Strategy of the India Foundation. Its full title — Aakrosh: Asian Journal on Terrorism and Internal Conflicts — states its brief precisely. Carrying the ISSN 2347-1522, it was founded and edited by Major General Afsir Karim (Retd), and it has been described by its publisher as India's first journal on transnational terrorism. For roughly two decades it provided a specialist forum in which serving and retired officers, diplomats and analysts examined insurgency, jihadist movements and the security politics of South and Central Asia.
The Publisher: India Foundation
The India Foundation is a New Delhi-based think tank whose Centre for Security and Strategy published Aakrosh. The Foundation's offices are at the India Habitat Centre on Lodhi Road, New Delhi, and the journal sat within its wider programme of strategic research and publication. The association with an institutional think tank, rather than a commercial publisher, shaped the journal's character: Aakrosh was a platform for policy-oriented security writing, produced for a readership of officials, scholars, journalists and security professionals rather than for the newsstand.
Founder-Editor Afsir Karim
The journal was inseparable from its founder-editor. Major General Afsir Karim, AVSM, was commissioned into the Indian Army in June 1954 and fought in the 1962 war with China and the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan; in 1971 he commanded a parachute battalion in the eastern theatre. He retired in May 1989 and turned to scholarship, becoming a noted commentator on counter-terrorism and on Jammu and Kashmir, where he had served extensively. He was a member of India's National Security Advisory Board from 1999 to 2001, a former editor of Indian Defence Review, and the author of books including Counter-Terrorism: The Pakistan Factor, Transnational Terrorism, and Kashmir: The Troubled Frontiers. His signed Editorial Perspective opened Aakrosh issues for years. General Karim died on 12 February 2019 after a long illness, and the India Foundation marked his passing as the loss of a central figure of India's strategic community.
Editorial Board and Contributors
The journal's editorial board, as printed in its later issues, included Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha (Retd), Shakti Sinha, Major General Dhruv Katoch (Retd) and Captain Alok Bansal (Retd) — a board drawn from the armed forces and the policy world. Its contributors reflected the same milieu. Issue contents from 2016 to 2018 list writers such as Ashok Kapur on North Korea and American foreign policy, Ramtanu Maitra on the Islamic State and Russia, Bibhu Prasad Routray on insurgency in India's North East, Jai Kumar Verma on the Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and N. Manoharan on counter-terror laws and security in India. The bylines combined retired military officers with academics and journalists specialising in conflict.
What the Journal Covered
Aakrosh's subject matter followed the security crises of its time. Recurring themes included terrorism and insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir and India's North East; Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism and India-Pakistan relations; the wars and peace processes of Afghanistan; the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its attempted spread into South Asia; al-Qaeda's ambitions in the subcontinent; China's strategic moves, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Chinese activity in the Indo-Pacific; and the internal dimensions of terrorism, from radicalisation to the psychological effects of terror violence on victims and societies. The October 2017 issue, for example, took up China's One Belt One Road project in Pakistan, the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region, and the growth of indigenous terrorism in Kashmir.
Issues and Rhythm of Publication
Published quarterly, Aakrosh reached Volume 19 in 2016 — its Number 71 appeared in April of that year, devoted heavily to the Islamic State's global campaign — and Volume 20 in 2017, when its issues examined the aftermath of the September 2016 Uri attack and India's cross-Line of Control strikes, among other subjects. Volume 21 followed in 2018, with the April issue (Number 79) carrying an editorial on jihadist movements in South Asia and contributions on Afghanistan, American policy and India-China relations, and the October issue (Number 81) addressing the changing strategic environment of South Asia and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Each issue was anchored by the editor's perspective piece, followed by a set of analytical articles, and the journal publicly trailed themes planned for forthcoming issues, inviting submissions months in advance.
Production and Subscription Details
The journal's imprint details from its final years record a compact, specialist operation. The editor worked from Noida, in Uttar Pradesh, while subscriptions were handled through Central News Agency in Connaught Circus, New Delhi. In 2017, single copies were priced at Rs. 130 (US$40 overseas), with annual subscriptions of Rs. 400 for individuals and Rs. 500 for institutions in India, postage included. Printing was by Thomson Press (India) Ltd. in Noida. The India Foundation has since made a number of Aakrosh issues available through its website as downloadable publications, keeping the journal's archive accessible after print publication ended.
Place in India's Security Literature
Aakrosh belonged to a small shelf of Indian strategic journals, but its focus was narrower and earlier than most: it was created specifically to study terrorism and internal conflict at a time when those subjects were still treated as branches of general defence commentary. Its pages documented, quarter by quarter, how India's security establishment understood the threats of the 2000s and 2010s — from Kashmir militancy and North East insurgencies to the Islamic State's attempt to build a South Asian constituency. As a primary record of that thinking, written largely by practitioners, the journal retains reference value for researchers of South Asian security even though its run is now closed.
The Forward Agenda
The journal also published its intentions in advance, and its forward notices show the breadth of its remit in its final years. For mid-2018 it trailed work on Afghanistan's renewed violence, the United States-Pakistan standoff, India-Pakistan relations, Islamic State activity in the Af-Pak region, and changing American policies towards South Asia and the Indo-Pacific. For late 2018 it planned coverage of India-China relations, Chinese naval activity in the Indo-Pacific, counter-terror legislation and security in India, and the state of India-Pakistan relations that year. Alongside its analytical articles, the Foundation's presentation of the journal situated its concerns within global data, noting, for instance, that terrorism's fatal casualties since 2013 had been concentrated overwhelmingly in a small group of countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria — even before the Islamic State's rise widened the threat. That mix of regional specialisation and global framing was characteristic of Aakrosh throughout its run.
Contributors Beyond the Military
Although retired officers anchored the journal, its contents pages show a wider circle. Academics and civilian analysts wrote on subjects from North Korea's strategic behaviour to the peace process in Afghanistan, the Islamic State's challenge to Russia, and the domestic legal architecture of counter-terrorism. Psychologists and civil-service specialists also appeared: one 2017 article examined the psychiatric aftermath of terrorism for victims and survivors, drawing on studies from Northern Ireland, Cambodia and Lebanon — a reminder that Aakrosh treated internal conflict as a social and human phenomenon as well as a military one. That breadth, within a tightly defined subject, is what separated the journal from a service magazine.
Legacy
The journal's identity rested on the soldier-scholar model its founder embodied: operational experience joined to academic study, and an insistence that terrorism deserved dedicated, continuous analysis rather than episodic attention after each attack. Through the India Foundation's Centre for Security and Strategy, Aakrosh connected retired officers, serving-policy analysts and academics in a single quarterly conversation for about twenty years. Its archive — preserved online by the Foundation — remains the most accessible monument to that conversation, and to General Afsir Karim's second career as one of India's earliest specialists in the study of transnational terrorism.
