India's trysts with authoritarianism

Mr Joseph opines that the threat of losing democratic ethos has been looming over India for far too long now

The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State

Author: Josy Joseph

Publisher: Context (Westland)

Pages:306

Price: Rs 699

Why would a CBI official be denied interrogating three high-profile Hindutva ideologues? Even though all evidence would point to Indore for the “second time”, in a lead to the 2006 Malegaon blasts, why would the security establishment not initiate a chase for (now MP) Pragya Singh Thakur? How can directors of a Delhi-based petrochemical company fly safely to London after having been booked for money laundering and circular trading of diamonds, among other financial irregularities?

Josy Joseph, investigative journalist and founder of digital media start-up Confluence Media, with more than two decades of experience of reporting on security and exposing crucial scams—Adarsh Housing Society, 2010 Commonwealth Games, and Naval War Room Leak, to name a few— offers insights into these questions and uncovers more about the way India’s security establishment functions in his latest book The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State. 

This year, a US-based NGO, Freedom House, which assesses political freedom around the world, declared India a “partly free” nation in its report. It cited the “multilayer pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies” have presided over the country as one of the causes of the country’s sharp decline in its “freedom score”. Presenting its worries about India’s future, it heavily criticised the Modi government under which minority communities face brutal suppression and dissenters get silenced.

Mr Joseph, however, opines that the threat of losing democratic ethos has been looming over India for far too long now. He narrates several tales of India’s compromise with intelligence and its tryst with borderline authoritarianism into two parts in this book.

In the first, he traces the decade-long struggle of Wahid, a slum dweller, and schoolteacher, to prove his innocence in a false accusation by the Mumbai police in the post-9/11 world. And, in the second, he tells multiple tales of how India’s security establishment and intelligence agencies have played an indelible role in weakening the democratic fabric of the country, and how they have become “willing slaves” at the hands of their powerful political masters.

Sample this: In 2020, Mr Joseph receives a WhatsApp message: “When I highlighted this 10 years ago … no one bothered”. The sender, Samdeep Mohan Varghese (or Sam), had attached with this message a Hindustan Times piece with the headline “CBI book Delhi company in Rs 1800-crore bank fraud case”. Sam, who was a complainant against the Delhi-based Jay Polychem India Ltd., and his family were hounded and harassed in this case, as the company had close ties with an influential political family in Punjab.

In another, Mr Joseph investigates why the Malegaon blast lead was ignored. He concludes: To deny the existence of Hindu terror, which he says is a “reality”, and to ensure that the larger narrative — the connection between a particular religion and terrorism — continues to run so that a few political agents and leaders can profit from this narrative. Though he mentions that religious beliefs have been “misused by violent elements to launch attacks on followers of other religions throughout history,” he finds the world’s “obsession with Islamist terror” baffling.

Besides the religious bias, in Mr Joseph’s opinion, lapses and intelligence failures also occur because of the “unprofessionalism” of the security establishment — and this includes the military. He complains that the intelligence agencies don’t verify or audit their sources. And when these often-unverified sources supply seemingly critical information, it is never examined to separate fact from fiction.

Though it deals with troubling issues, the book isn’t devoid of humour. Here’s one incidence, for example: “On 30 January 1971, an Indian Airlines flight, Ganga, was hijacked by two Kashmiri youth carrying toy guns and fake grenades and taken to Lahore.” And this anecdote from Let Me Say It Now, a memoir by the former Mumbai police commissioner Rakesh Maria: Once two thieves, who offered the policemen help in fixing their vehicle, sat in the driving seat, asking the three policemen to push the broken-down vehicle only to outsmart them and run away. A scene right out of a Bollywood movie.

But as much as Mr Joseph’s craft and storytelling delights, it is also dismaying in its tenor. His concerns about the professionalism of the security establishment are real and worrisome. He fears that the continued mismanagement of the security agencies will turn out to be India’s “worst nightmare.” Though he’s confident that such a future can be avoided, the statistics send a warning signal. Mr Joseph highlights that the “estimates suggest that, since 1950”, out of the “over 460 coup attempts” around the world, 233 have been successful. Marry these statistics with the situation in which a country runs on falsehoods, and you’ll get a country in unrest, which makes it a perfect site for both internal and external actors to take control of it.