Book Review: The Silent Coup
Veteran journalist Josy Joseph’s new book that is the talking point of India’s upper middle class at the moment goes into the minute details of the regular and casual abuse of power in India.
A good way of measuring how civilized a country is to examine the relationship between its general public and the state organs like the police. Would a person in Sweden, the Netherlands or Germany hesitate to approach a policeman on the street or call the police if the need arose? Do ordinary people in those countries worry about bureaucrats, petty officials, inspectors or small-time politicians harassing them in their day to day life? Anyone who is familiar with these northern European countries would know the answer to these questions. Now, let us look at the “world’s largest democracy.” How many middle class people would willingly approach the state organs or the police for any kind of help? Further down the economic ladder who in their right mind would even think of seeking recourse from the state?
Veteran journalist Josy Joseph’s new book that is the talking point of India’s upper middle class at the moment goes into the minute details of the regular and casual abuse of power in India. Titled The Silent Coup. A History of India’s Deep State the book follows the lives of an innocent Muslim who was falsely accused in a bomb blast case and had to spend years behind bars, since the government and the police needed to show that some action was taken. Several such false arrests gave some officials the opportunity to rise up the ranks in the police, intelligence services and civil service bureaucracy. Joseph also writes about the murky situation in the Kashmir Valley, where it clearly looks like it is in the interest of security officials for there to be a perpetual state of conflict. Other important areas covered in the book include the Punjab insurgency and the way it was brutally put down, India’s interference in the Sri Lankan civil war and the much-touted “Gujarat Model.” There’s also a part dedicated to the travails of a former employee of dubious, but politically well-connected businessmen.
Willing participants and informers
This book is not some attempt to ‘malign the present government’ as some of Joseph’s critics (who I suspect haven’t even read the book) are saying. When India attained independence, the new rulers decided to not get rid of the draconian police powers that the colonisers introduced in India. Among the methods used by powerful officials include paying and retaining a regular set of informers. Joseph writes: “For each piece of information, there is a price that the security forces and intelligence agencies are ready to pay. Thousands of people across the country, whether your next-door neighbour or a high-flying journalist, could be retainers earning handsome fees as informants.”
An innocent Muslim school teacher kept getting arrested on leads from a cleric in a mosque he visited. The agencies in India have informers everywhere, much in the same way the KGB did across the Soviet Union.
When Joseph was tasked with writing about India-Pakistan affairs for The Times of India’s online desk, a senior official of the Intelligence Bureau approached him and offered a monthly retainer fee for putting their perspective in his reports. Given how some news channels now parrot the official narrative with a great degree of passion, it wouldn’t shock anyone if some of these anchors were on the payroll of the state’s agencies.
The IPKF disaster
As someone who has managed to integrate himself into Sri Lankan culture, I read the section on the country’s civil war and the Indian intervention with great interest. The dreaded terrorist outfit the LTTE was once regarded by India’s security establishment as “our boys.” This chapter goes into detail about the violence unleashed on innocent people by the Sri Lankan Army, the IPKF and the LTTE.
When I wrote an article for National Geographic Traveller, India about a visit to Jaffna, I got an interesting message from a retired army officer who served there with the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) in the 1980s. While passing his complements about the article, the gentleman asked me a question about one small line. I had mentioned that I felt a sense of shame when crossing a public hospital in the city, as it was the same place where the IPKF murdered civilians and doctors. The retired serviceman asked me for my source of this information, claiming he had never heard of such an incident. When I showed him snippets from V. R. Krishna Iyer’s report on the IPKF, the serviceman claimed the eminent jurist was fooled by LTTE propaganda!
In his book, Joseph wrote about the incident at the Jaffna Teaching Hospital:
“On 21 October, around 11 a.m., helicopters and cannons of the Indian military fired at Jaffna Teaching Hospital, the premier healthcare institution in the peninsula. Over the next twenty-four hours there was a bloodbath inside the hospital premises. (Lt General) Deepinder Singh claims that his troops were attacked by LTTE cadres who had taken shelter in the hospital. Others called it a massacre by Indian troops. By the end of the firefight, almost seventy people, including doctors, nurses and patients, were dead. Indian troops were also accused of burning the bodies.”
There is a very detailed account of India’s intervention in Sri Lanka in the book Assignment Colombo, written by J.N. Dixit, who was India’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka during those troubled days. The book has completely vanished off the face of the earth, and only a few libraries now have copies. I have read bits and pieces of the book and it clearly implicates several people for a great amount of misdeeds. One of these people is a powerful minister in the Indian government at the moment.
Narendra Modi’s rise
A large number of people who voted for Narendra Modi in 2019 are millennials who were too young to remember what happened in Gujarat in 2002. Those events that began with the burning of a coach of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra culminated in a communal massacre of innocent people and the rise of Modi as a political figure. I would recommend those who were too young to understand what happened in Gujarat in 2002 to read the section called the Gujarat Model and understand how India now has its present leadership.
The state, its bureaucrats and security officials have played an enormous role in transforming India to what it is today. This chapter goes into detail to explain the rise of Modi.
For those who argue that riots and fake encounters have happened regularly in many states in India, here’s what the writer says:
“Were other states not carrying out fake encounters? Why was Gujarat any different? This question needs to be answered. It is true that, across India, state police forces were engaging in fake encounters, custodial torture and other cruelties. However, In Gujarat, the state arm of a Central agency, according to multiple sources I have interviewed over the years, played a major role in orchestrating some of these encounters, especially in the Ishrat Jahan case. Secondly, and more importantly, based on my extrapolation from various enquiry committee reports, including the Justice Bedi Committee report, the encounters were all aimed at building the political image of the chief minister and his party, and stoked Islamophobia through fake claims.”
We are indeed witnessing the Gujarat model across the length and breadth of India these days, and the targets are not just Muslims. Just think of the all the accused in the Bhima Koregoan case who have been languishing in jail for more than three years.
Joseph concedes that the abuse of state power and the corrupting of institutions began during the reign of the Congress, but cites examples about how these institutions showed signs of becoming independent during the years when Manmohan Singh was the prime minister. All that progress has been erased in the last seven years. The author stated the following in the penultimate paragraph:
“The wave of transparency that swept through Indian governance and establishment structures through the previous decade, thanks to laws like the Right to Information Act, was swiftly reversed. In 2021, the U.S. think tank Freedom House downgraded India’s status from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’- one indicator among many of the democratic slide that these developments have led to.”
But all is not lost. This book is being talked about by those in power, and it is clear that some of the most influential people in the country have taken note of it. A recent statement by India’s chief justice that he had a “lot of reservations” about the way the bureaucracy and police officers were behaving, suggests that there may still be some hope for India.