The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State
by Josy Joseph
Published by Westland Books
Rs. 699
Pages 306

-Anil Thakore

Up until the year 2012, barring a two year blip in the Emergency period (1975-76), India was widely acknowledged as free and democratic, and ranked among the top 30 countries worldwide in the indices of institutions monitoring the governance of nations. But in 2020, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) assessed it as a “flawed democracy”. The Swedish institute V-Dem has described the Indian state as an “electoral autocracy”, while Freedom House, the US-based global democracy watchdog has demoted India from “free” to “partly free”.

In The Silent Coup (2021), Josy Joseph, a Delhi-based investigative journalist with excellent credentials (Times of India, The Hindu) and currently founder-director of Confluence Media — “a platform agnostic investigative journalism outfit” — poses a fundamental question: “How can a coterie of influential people, stationed mostly in a single city, unsettle democratic institutions, intimidate millions into silence, send thousands to jail, terrorise its business class into supporting it, bully the media into becoming its publicity arm, convert the judiciary into a timid institution, and even silence the most courageous of its civil servants?”

Subsequently by presenting persuasive evidence, and well-researched facts, Joseph details how the incumbent political establishment at the Centre has insidiously captured power and control of the nation and is eroding the democratic rights of India’s citizens. In this book which has unsurprisingly received little publicity, Joseph offers insights on how the establishment and governments at the Centre and states have subverted the democratic rights of citizens, to attain new political, commercial, and ideological objectives.

The Deep State according to Joseph is a plethora of compromised law enforcement agencies such as RAW, NIA, NCB, CBI, ED, the Central and State Police, CRPF etc, promoted to protect the unity and integrity of the country. These agencies are controlled by pliant bureaucrats, who over the years have enacted draconian laws such as MISA, TADA, POTA, DAA, UAPA, AFSPA, NSA to side-step or cut short the jurisdiction of the courts and dilute the fundamental rights and liberty of citizens.

The impact of the calculated acts of omission and commission of the deep state establishment has been devastating. Joseph maintains that 400,000 people are in jails across the country, over 76 percent incarcerated without trial. Over 2,000 intellectuals, artists, activists, dissenters are in jails under UAPA, also without trial. In 1990-2000, NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) reported over 1,093 custodial deaths. Subsequent reportage has been muted, but the death of Father Stan Swamy in 2021 is a grim reminder of the excessive power of the deep state.

Joseph traces the rise of the deep state establishment to the Emergency when Indira Gandhi usurped the powers of the State, invalidated the Constitution and unleashed a reign of terror and lawlessness across the country. The Emergency demonstrated how a small coterie vested with draconian powers, can bring India’s democracy to its knees. During the 19 months of the Emergency, Parliament enacted a barrage of new laws investing huge discretionary powers in the bureaucracy which has gradually diluted all the rights of citizens.

The BJP/NDA government, the author posits, has learnt a lot from the Emergency. It has enacted an artillery of legislation and unleashed the army of enforcement agencies on the people of India. The pages of The Silent Coup, recount the resuscitation of the RSS, spread of the ‘Us versus Them’ narrative leading to the Babri Masjid demolition, dissemination of the Hindu mindset through the Gujarat carnage, the Mumbai bomb blasts, Malegaon bomb blasts, the Samjautha Express and the several bomb blasts in cities across the country that injected fear into the minds of the population.

This volume specially investigates the Gujarat carnage of 2002, termed as “a crime against humanity,” how encounter killings became a norm, how a cop who spoke out is languishing in a Gujarat prison, while the perpetrators of the massacre of thousands are ruling the country today. It recalls the mystery of the daylight murder of Haren Pandya, encounter killing of Shorabuddin Shaikh, murder of Justice Loya, with the principal accused a respected member of Parliament today. It also reveals how over a period of 20 years Gujarat became a laboratory for the BJP majoritarian ideology and how the “Gujarat model” dominates the current political discourse.

After giving the reader his take on Kashmir which he describes “a betrayal of the Muslim people of Kashmir by the Indian State” and tracing the history of the Punjab imbroglio, Joseph brings us to the present. According to him, the deep state has mastered and is utilising the advances of technology like the internet and spyware, to silence voices, crush dissent, marginalise minorities and extinguish NGOs. The attack on Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity has survived because of international outrage, but most other NGOs have been stifled or have exited the country, leaving the poorest of the poor and marginalised at the mercy of the State.

The Silent Coup, which as the sub-title denotes, delineates the rise of India’s powerful Deep State is recommended reading for every citizen concerned about freedom and democratic rights. By harnessing the powers of advanced surveillance technologies, the new establishment is eroding the fundamental rights of the citizenry and enabling the rise and entrenchment of a demagogic, theocratic, majoritarian ideology. It’s a wake-up call to citizenry that should not be ignored.