Compelling wake-up call: The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State

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…