ABSTRACT National and state-level security forces across India operate against insurgents, criminals, and external threats. These operations are politically consequential, yet these forces tend to be quite opaque. This article provides new data on the fatalities that these forces have suffered in order to explore the location and nature of political violence in India. We create several new datasets of security force fatalities extracted from commemorative security force “martyrs” documents and online databases published by Indian state-level police organizations, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), and the Ministry of Defence, as well as semi-official sources. The data vary wildly in quality and detail, and there are serious limits to their use. Nevertheless, they allow us to – with caveats – measure the location and incidence of violence, as well as the demographic underpinnings of the Indian Army, the two largest MHA paramilitaries, and several state police forces. Caveats aside, we anticipate that subsets of these data are sufficiently high in quality, facilitating future rigorous quantitative analysis on political violence in India. The entire dataset will be made publicly available.

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关于印度安全部队死亡人数和人口统计的新数据

摘要 印度各地的国家和邦级安全部队都在打击叛乱分子、犯罪分子和外部威胁。这些行动在政治上具有重要意义，但这些力量往往相当不透明。本文提供了有关这些部队所遭受的死亡人数的新数据，以探索印度政治暴力的地点和性质。我们从印度国家级警察组织、内政部 (MHA) 和国防部发布的安全部队“烈士”纪念文件和在线数据库以及半官方消息来源。这些数据在质量和细节上千差万别，并且它们的使用受到严重限制。尽管如此，它们允许我们——但有警告——衡量暴力的地点和发生率，以及印度军队、两个最大的 MHA 准军事组织和几个州警察部队的人口基础。抛开警告不谈，我们预计这些数据的子集质量足够高，有助于未来对印度政治暴力进行严格的定量分析。整个数据集将公开提供。