India, Aug. 23 -- As foreign states go on mobilizing private technology firms and intelligence hybrids to neutralize external threats in real time, India faces a strategic question.

state-backed hackers slip into a country's grid and the lights start to fail, or they slip into its hospitals and the machines start to falter, or they simply sit on its industrial data, hostage now, waiting on a ransom-and every citizen watching this feels the same reflex rise in it, unbidden, the oldest reflex there is, which is simply to hit back. And yet the record runs the other way, has run the other way for decades: democratic legal traditions built themselves around outlawing exactly that reflex, treating unauthorized intrusion into a computer system ...