Showing posts with label intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intelligence. Show all posts

Wednesday, 19 April 2023

 https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/pulwama-india-pussy-foots-around?sd=pf

Pulwama: India pussy-foots around the conspiracy theory


APR 19, 2023

Not too many should care for Satya Pal Malik. He set the stage for the Center to decapitate Article 370 by hastily dissolving the legislative assembly, despite knowing – by his own admission in the Karan Thapar interview - of the forming of a coalition that could last the remainder of the session.

His belated ‘revelations’ too have nothing new and of note. Malik’s is old wine in new bottle, though some still want a drink from it.

That no one has been punished for the delinquency surrounding the Pulwama episode is well known. Malik’s view that the Center looked the other way so as to profit domestically from the attack is also widely held.

Missing in the fresh look at Pulwama today is the picture that forms from the threads Malik leaves hanging.

Shooting the messenger

He says that the explosive laden car was moving around for some 10 days and more. He informs that some eight odd key road intersections in the general area were left unattended by the road opening parties. To him, the explosives were Pakistani handiwork, though the cracks through which crept in the terror attack were provided by Indian inattention.

He thus craftily lays off from putting together the implications of what he is saying. The attendant commentary too has avoided taking the bull by the horns. It too has fallen by the official line of a Pakistani provenance of the attack, which the regime allowed to hit the target for its own reasons.

Malik has his reasons to have gone public with his version. Down to one security guard – security having been pulled back by the typically vindictive regime for his outspokenness on the farmers agitation - he is obviously uncomfortable. 

However, noteworthy is not his criticism of the regime as much as what he obscures in the process. By attributing the explosives to Pakistan, he propagates the regime’s narrative. By taking back his earlier take on Amit Shah’s comment on Narendra Modi, he ingratiates himself back into the good books of the regime’s chief hatchet man.

This supposedly revelatory interview – that Thapar has oversold and the opposition has gone to town with – is the use of Malik by the regime for its own purposes and Malik’s self-interested lending of his supposedly credible image. Count the number of times Malik touches his nose and see if he is suffering the Pinocchio syndrome.

The Pulwama strike is being used to show up the regime either as negligent or as culpable in letting it get through for using the counter strike in its aftermath for vote catching purposes. Malik’s interview shows the latter as the more likely of the two.

This is bad enough, though a worse possibility has been elided in the discussion so far.

In the rear-view mirror

There were intelligence soundings on an impending strike but the regime deliberately played along – mounting an ambush for Pakistan to walk into. It could then use the aftermath to nail Pakistan, both diplomatically - as fount of terror - and militarily with a surgical strike – with an aerial strike at Balakot.

For a regime swearing by Chanakya to take advantage of the Pulwama-Balakot episode is unremarkable. It had ridden on the apron strings of the military’s earlier surgical strikes in elections in Uttar Pradesh and had conducted Parakram Parv in the subsequent year to influence voters in provincial polls about then.

Malik has only served enhance the regime’s assiduously built-up image for craftiness. This helps the strong-on-defence credentials in which its Kautilyan deceit and cunning keeps India secure from neighbourly treachery.

It’s to the regime’s credit that it went ahead with Operation Bandar - its strike at Balakot – risking a Pakistani Operation Swift Resort. Whereas Amit Shah beat the drums of success after Balakot, the Air Force has been more circumspect.

To Amit Shah, 300 dead madrasa children may mean nothing, but such a scenario would have been a hit-wicket for India. Luckily, its Air Force missed target. It would certainly have been untenable in international law if it had scored bulls-eye.

The strike wasn’t quite ‘preemptive’, as the senior Indian diplomat put it in the press conference that afternoon, but at best was ‘preventive’, an international law innovation that even the United States (US) could not pull off.

Whereas Israel can weather diplomatic storms that result from such action, India is not quite in its league with a skin thickened by a superpower’s patronage.

Whereas India might have missed target due to the complexity of the operation, it is not impossible that the target might have been deliberately missed – in a kind of step-up in the messaging to Pakistan.

That Pakistan - in turn - claims to have deliberately missed the targets along the Line of Control (LC) strengthens the case that the aerial exchanges were more messaging than the real thing.

That hot pursuit resulted in a downed Indian plane is merely uncertainty surrounding combat.   

A military historian famously has it that not only were the air strikes a success, but the Pakistani counter was dented by their loss of an F-16 – the latter claim under-grid by grant of a gallantry award to the Mig-21 pilot who - however improbably - downed the F-16.

Sensibly, the regime quickly climbed down from its rhetorical high when references to readiness of missiles started being bandied by both sides. It allowed the US to intervene tacitly with its good offices, using the return of the captured pilot to wind down the crisis.

The crisis had served its purpose. The day after Balakot witnessed a Modi jaunt in the Delhi Metro. This was perhaps advised by his choreographers in the Prime Minister’s Office after seeing the Oscar winning Churchill that shows Churchill milling with the London Underground crowds after having ordered D-Day.

The difference wouldn’t ever be known to the domestic audience – the Churchill had escaped his security to have a breath of fresh air away from officialdom, whereas Modi was just being Modi. Pakistan’s swift retort came the following morning.

Modi’s not cornered yet

For the opposition to now take up cudgels on this Pulwama episode is easy to understand. There is little ammunition it has and in election year it must make good use of any purchase it gets to keep Modi from repeating his hattrick of election wins from Gujarat at the national stage.

An alert opposition also puts Modi on notice that similar gambits this time round would not win him any political dividend.

What the kerfuffle certainly cannot do by itself is to keep Modi from another electoral victory.

The regime is on comfortable ground. It has taken care not to publicly pursue where the explosives came from, so that its contention that it was orchestrated by Pakistan is not watered down.

Even if it did not come on the back of infiltrators – infiltration had fallen precipitately by then and the Army would furiously contest that it came through the LC – it could have been collected from the several dozen road and dam building sites across Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) by a nexus of over-ground workers. The regime may have since quietly plugged the explosive pipeline.

The Pakistan card helps the regime tip-toe away from the wreckage that had 40 bodies of troopers in it. If the regime did not concede a joint parliamentary committee on Adani, it is hardly likely to come up with a white paper on Pulwama.

Next-of-kin agitation is not going to budge it either, Rs 1 crore each compensation having been dispensed already per victim to keep them from asking after or the truth. The Rajasthan government just turned down a demand for jobs for relatives.

There’s is no dearth of explosive availability within Kashmir.  The explosives used in the Malegaon terror attack were procured by an army intelligence official. It may well have been from stocks confiscated from anti-national elements there, in official custody.

However, if, as Malik implies, the regime was in the know of a tragedy waiting to happen, it cannot be put beyond Indian intelligence capability and venality that India either turned a blind eye as the explosives were put together at a Pakistani handler’s behest, or - going a step further - facilitated access to explosives.

The conspiracy theory kicks in

There are two kinds of black operations.

One is facilitation, allowing a terror attack to get through or nudging it a certain way. The second is orchestrating a terror attack oneself.

In the Pulwama case either of the two is plausible.

A clue is in the posting of controversial police officer, Devendra Singh, till the preceding year in Pulwama. Expectedly, Malik lets him off the hook, saying he was not ‘anti-national’.

To be sure Singh was not being anti-national in putting together the elements that go into a black operation – arguably he was doing his duty in line with his expertise.

Later reports on the Pulwama bomber have it that he had been in and out of the police station some six times, some of which may have been when Singh was part of the Pulwama police team.

Recall also, Singh figures in the conspiracy angle to the parliament attack, allegedly one of the intelligence agents who facilitated the move of terrorists to Delhi for the job. If true, this makes that incident a black operation of the first kind.

Most recently, he was let off the hook for ferrying terrorists in his car – terrorists who were involved in another possible Indian black operation of the second kind designed to implicate Kashmiri militants – and at one remove Pakistan. In this operation, non-Kashmiri migrant workers were gunned down in wake of the Article 370 clampdown.

Singh roaming free can only be for services of an appropriate order rendered earlier – no less than playing a stellar role in facilitating black operations.

Importantly, if there is a Singh at the tactical level, there has to also be an expert hand at the strategic level. More intimate tracing of the career trajectories of intelligence insiders - than has recently been done in a book by a master of the ‘trade’ - might have a future tale on this score.

The then corps commander – who incidentally was just then settling into his new job - announced that the Pulwama bomber’s team had been neutralized within a couple of days of the atrocity. Evidently, this could have been done preemptively too. (Malik’s intervention may delay release of the biography of the General, now retired.)

Going toe-to-toe with the mainstream narrative

It’s a pity that conspiracy theories - as here - don’t have traction.

Firstly, mainstream analysts and media risk missing out on crumbs from the table if they entertain such speculation. Secondly, just as earlier, so to in the post-truth age, the dominant narrative and - indeed history itself - is written by the one with an upper hand, which in India’s case currently are Hindutva minders. Thirdly, it’s become dangerous to say the obvious in authoritarian India. Investigative journalists are extinct and those who dare, hounded.

However, factoring in the conspiracy theory makes things fall into place.

India is no stranger to black operations.

When it was blindsided by the Kargil caper of the Pakistan Army, India was severely pushed on to the backfoot in the Valley. It needed to get back at Pakistan. Operation Kabaddi, involving seizing a few Pakistani posts on the LC, to up the ante, was thought up.

Mindful that India was no Israel, India was restrained by the lack of a persuasive casus belli. Along came a timely terror attack on the legislative assembly in Srinagar. In the event, 9/11 intervened and Operation Kabaddi had to be stowed away.

Musharraf, fearful of being bombed back into the stone age, cuddled up with the US. However, duplicity compelled him to try to open up a second front to his east in an India angered by the back-to-back terror attacks on the assembly and parliament. It would have allowed him a reasonable excuse to quit corralling the Taliban and Al Qaeda on his northern border.

Alternatively, if these terror instances were of the second kind - India initiated - then it can plausibly be argued that India was manufacturing a casus belli to rein in Pakistan. Agra talks having failed there was the military instrument left.

The conspiracy theory has it that the parliament attack was allowed to go through – if not orchestrated by itself – by India to give it an excuse for coercive diplomacy. The US could help pull some of India’s chestnuts out of the fire.

The trials of SAR Geelani and of Afzal Guru have enough loose ends to infer that there was more to the parliament attack than the mainstream narrative has it.

The first kind of black operation is seen yet again at least twice later on.  

26/11 has such finger prints all over it. As with the Pulwama attack, it had Pakistani provenance. Elided however is that it might well have had an Indian adjunct, in which a set of majoritarian extremists infiltrated a Pakistani terror attack to kill the redoubtable police officers who were on their scent: Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte.

Similarly, there is little doubt that the Pathankot terror attack had Pakistani origin. That a senior officer of the police helped out the attackers by lending them his official car makes this a black operation of the first category. Unlike the crew of the Kuber – who were summarily disposed-off by the Mumbai attackers - this police officer merely had his hands tied-up. 

The second kind of black operation is also well represented in Indian repertoire. Exoneration of Muslims accused in the Mumbai train bombings shows it up as a plausible black operation.

It’s self-evident that Muslims supposedly out to avenge the Gujarat pogrom were also victims of black operations: ‘Encounters’. The victims included a girl of nineteen and a housewife, raped, murdered and then burnt.

The latest black operation of the second kind has been televised live: the killing of Atiq Ahmed. This time round black operations have come out of the closet: holes in the story deliberately left for all to see - and fear. It’s ‘terrorism’ – the action being the message and the message broadcast.

Whats to be done?

Even if the line of argument here is entirely misplaced, a few things need being done in any case.

First, the Intelligence Bureau needs to be domesticated through appropriate legislation. Second, the National Investigative Agency has to be rescued from being yet another caged parrot. Third, the parliament must give itself a standing committee to oversee the intelligence domain. Fourth, the Courts must wise up to reality.

Getting the structure right isn’t enough. There is culture to contend with too.

One, Rule of Law is an attitude, an approach. Never our strength, it’s been drawn and quartered over the last nine years under Amit Shah’s stewardship, the architect of the Gujarat Model in this sphere.

Two, the assumption that anything written in Sanskrit is panacea needs review. Chanakya may have had it right once. Adapting him to India’s current circumstance with better interpretative studies needs being done. Indian Knowledge Systems have to be decontaminated of supremacism.

Three, stop hagiography in the name of analysis. Call out brown-nosed analysts and red-clawed strategy minders. The imposition against security services’ members writing their memoirs is testimony of hidden skeletons. When military history is served hot from the Establishment’s cauldron, why must dissenting conspiracy theorists – as this writer - run a reputational risk?

Lessons from Malik’s belated outburst

The price of not doing right is high.

Politically, it is evident that Hindutva has taken over the intelligence domain. In fact, there might even be a nefarious nexus between the two that propelled Hindutva to political power. The Deep State must be dismantled as part of detoxification if the improbable does happen in 2029.

Strategically, believing as Nationalists do in, ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is wrong. Patriotism requires strategists to push for the State to be right. Strategic ethics demands that when patriotism is enough, nationalism is unnecessary. 

Diplomatically, what-ever the ever-glib Dr. S Jaishankar and his able diplomats might say in the chambers of the international community on terrorism, their counterparts must surely be reading cables home from their Delhi embassies.

Militarily, the only institution that can possibly speak truth to power and get away with it is the military. It must query orders such as received by Gen ‘Paddy’ Padmanabhan: ‘Dekhenge’. It surely received a similar order after Galwan.

The military must point out that if the black operations are deducted from Pakistan’s corpus on villainy, then it is amenable to meaningful outreach. Else, the Two Front threat will never go away. To buy into the Hindutva-propagated millennial adversary, the Muslim, both inhouse and next-door, is to be political.

Malik may yet have done some good by speaking up, even if traversing known terrain. For this service to strategic discussion, he should be given back his exalted threat status and security detail.

Monday, 13 March 2023

 https://www.thebookreviewindia.org/stories-across-space-and-time-from-the-pen-of-an-indian-spymaster/

A LIFE IN THE SHADOWS: A MEMOIR by AS Dulat HarperCollins, Gurugram, 2023, 256 pp., ₹ 699.00

The book review india, MARCH 2023, VOLUME 47, NO 3

AS Dulat is reported to have put out, the book under review has been written without taking clearance from current-day intelligence minders. An earlier government order had it that those serving and retired from intelligence services were required to take such clearance prior to publishing anything related to their work. Dulat, former Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) head and Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer, has cocked a snook at the order with good reason. On the surface, there is nothing in the book that should see him fall afoul of powers-that-be. In other words, there is little upfront in the book for a reviewer to encourage readers to get a copy. The book however says much, if read between the lines.

A major point that the author puts across in his seemingly casual manner is that there is a hard-line operational in Kashmir and against Pakistan. This owes in part to a streak of ruthlessness in the personality of National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval. Dulat devotes the better part of a chapter to get us familiar with his ‘friend’ and former IB colleague, Doval. To Dulat, Doval is the ideally suited security manager for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who enjoys the reputation of a strong man publicized assiduously since his days in Gujarat and now as the Prime Minister taking ownership of surgical strikes.

But it is not only the personality factor responsible for the situation, but the frame is provided by the tussle between the two security paradigms: realism and liberalism. Though a liberal himself, he is realist enough to understands that force has a role to play in managing internal conflict. His liberal orientation however makes it obvious to him that dialogue is the answer in such circumstance.

As a Sikh, he was witness to how the Khalistani insurgency was tackled. There too the liberal-realist tussle played out in the contrasting approaches of policing heroes, Julio Ribeiro and KPS Gill. While Ribeiro’s was a people friendly approach, Gill was unapologetic about strong arm methods. To Dulat, even if effective, as was the case in Punjab, such rough and ready methods have an avoidable price in societal alienation.

He applies his finding to Kashmir and concludes that the policies of suppression operational there are counter-productive. He rues the inability or unwillingness of the State to resort to readily available political means such as reaching out to both the mainstream regional political parties. He believes even the Hurriyat is ripe for engagement, the security dragnet having suitably tamed its separatism. Pakistan has also sensibly kept its distance, warned off by India’s public lowering of its threshold for violent retaliation in surgical strikes.

Being witness to the hard-line is painful for Dulat, who has had a long professional association with the Kashmir issue. While he was the intelligence services’ pointsman for Kashmir for the initial decade and half of the insurgency, he developed a deep understanding of and affiliation with Kashmiris. That the Kashmiris have been facing the rough end of the Indian stick lately troubles him. The book thus serves a purpose of a reasoned and timely critique of Modi’s policies in Kashmir.

Dulat’s is a voice that can credibly do so. He was the intelligence hand in Kashmir at the outbreak of the insurgency. Later back in Delhi he headed the Kashmir desk, while Doval was in the field in Kashmir reporting to him. He became acquainted with Doval’s tough line back then, but reasons that so long as the cat caught mice, there was no quibbling over its colour. After the stint as head of the R&AW, he was absorbed into Vajpayee’s prime ministerial office as adviser on Kashmir. The episode of the Kandahar hijack is an evocative read, with Doval’s role recounted being particularly interesting since it shows how Doval reacts under pressure.

Vajpayee was a votary of a soft-line in Kashmir and in regard to Pakistan. Dulat has recounted his experience then in his other book, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, recorded on the dust cover of this book as a bestseller. Unfortunately, Dulat’s efforts at conflict resolution by bringing the Hurriyat onboard for talks with the Home Minister Advani could not be taken to culmination by the next government of Manmohan Singh.

While Singh carried forward the dialogue, it lost its way - as did India’s Pakistan rapprochement strategy - with 26/11 Mumbai terror attack writing the epitaph. Dulat nevertheless persisted in his peace-making efforts, this time at the Track II by participating in a conclave of intelligence chiefs of both sides. His interaction with Pakistani spy chief General Durrani is carried in his other ‘bestseller’, The Spy Chronicles.

The book reviewed here is in part Dulat’s latest effort in this noble, if thankless, cause. His chapter on Farooq Abdullah is advocacy for the government to use Abdullah’s good offices in steps out of the quagmire it has got India into in Kashmir with its wanton jettisoning of the Article 370 jugular that linked Kashmir to India. The book gives us insight as to why Dulat is indefatigably on this course, trying to end a protracted conflict.

The first chapter is about his family background, suggestive of an elite upbringing with old school values that have increasingly got out of place in New India. The book is in the form of a collection of vignettes from his eventful life, covering his association with President Giani Zail Singh and, as the spook in-charge of security of visiting dignitaries, with significant political personages of late last century, such as Margaret Thatcher and Lee Kuan Yew. Of interest to professionals and faculties in security studies would be his dilation on the ‘trade’, as the world of spooks is known, and his foreign stint in Nepal. Significant is Dulat’s revelation of how during his tenure as the IB head in Bhopal, that included the response to the gas tragedy, he was rudely reminded in a mob attack on a train he was embarked on during the anti-Sikh pogrom that he was ultimately, Sikh.

Though Dulat presents himself as a laid-back, cricket-playing chap who enjoys his drinks and conversation, he nevertheless comes across as a serious security practitioner. He deliberately eschews trying to impress his reader with any insider knowledge and highfalutin jargon. It’s almost as though he has exhausted his analytical thrust in his official missives.

The good that accrues is that the book then is an accessible one for students of security and peace studies. The bad part is that it appears there is much unsaid in the book in a self-censorship that relegates the book to a travel companion to be picked up at an airport bookstore. Even so, the book is a useful addition in parts to the books by diplomats – such as Satinder Lambah - that have contributed to the understanding of the intractable India-Pakistan conflict and to books by reputed journalists - as Anuradha Bhasin - on the Kashmir conflict.

 

 

 

 

 


Monday, 4 October 2021

 https://www.milligazette.com/news/7-analysis/33928-indias-deep-state-no-longer-secret/

unedited version

India’s  ‘deep state’ no longer secret

The term ‘deep state’ is familiar to India’s strategic community in relation to nature of the Pakistani state. There, the Pakistan army and its intelligence arm, the ubiquitous Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, deserve the characterization of ‘a state within a state’ and prove the description that goes, ‘whereas other states have an army respectively, the Pakistan army has a state’. However, for the phrase to have resonance in India in respect of India’s security apparatus is novel.

Having first discussed India’s ‘deep state’ in my article in 2018 and looked at its workings in another article the following year, it was gratifying to find the phrase in the subtitle of Josy Joseph’s recent book, The Silent Coup: A history of India’s deep state. Joseph has connected the dots going back a quarter century and presented the concept as meaningful for characterizing a portion of India’s security and intelligence apparatus. The portion comprises current-day elite national security decision makers and their implementing affiliates in the sword-arm intelligence and police forces. 

Among readers of this journal and attentive members of India’s largest minority, its Muslims, what he says is rather well known. The Muslim community has been subject to the close attention of this element in the national security structure. Josephs helps flesh out the concept of deep state more fully, thereby, helping deepen the picture the community already has of the phenomenon into a thorough going understanding.  

Origin of the deep state

His investigative journalism reveals that the idea of having a deep state was suggested to the Indian side in its confabulations with a foreign government sometime in 2003. Though he does not let on which government, it could be the United States (US), with which the National Democratic Alliance government was in close contact about then. India was hoping to overturn the sanctions that it had been subject to for its blasting its way into the nuclear club in 1998.

The US for its part wanted to have India alongside in its global war on terror (GWOT) that was about then on the cusp of expansion of its footprint from within the region, in Afghanistan, to Iraq. Facing Pakistani duplicity in the GWOT and a then over-the-horizon challenge in China, the Bush administration had alighted on India as a candidate to bolster as a future power in order to keep India’s neighbours in check.

At that juncture, India had been poised through 2002 in Operation Parakram, coercing Pakistan to reverse its proxy war in India. One conduit to force Pakistan to fall in line was to use the US proximity with Pakistan and use the rhetoric around terror to have Pakistan roll back its policy of sponsorship of terror. Perhaps, as part of this strategic convergence between the two hitherto estranged democracies – as India-US relations have been termed – the US may have suggested the creation and operation of a deep state to India.

The US had been instrumental in defusing the year-long post parliament attack crisis and coming up with its limitations in crisis diplomacy, including a push back from Pakistan that similarly it should also prevail on India to resolve the Kashmir issue. It perhaps hoped to have India cater for security for itself. Since conventional war that India threatened to deter Pakistan would have proved distracting for the US in its GWOT, it may have wanted to be rid of India’s repeated remonstrations against its ally in the GWOT, Pakistan, by having India cater for its security through the subconventional route, through mirroring the terror strategy of Pakistan in a strategy of sorts serving Pakistan a taste of its own medicine.

Another candidate country that might have whispered into India’s ears as part of a growing conversation about then is Israel. With Israel, the relations had been opened a decade earlier in the early nineties as India reshaped its foreign policy to face a post Cold War world. Under the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) led NDA, the BJP’s ideological affinities with Zionism and a buyer-seller relationship deepened since the Kargil War, when Israel had furnished many of India’s emergent requirements including artillery ammunition, led to a closer engagement.

Israel also has a grouse against Pakistani, viewing Pakistan’s so-called ‘Islamic bomb’ with some suspicion. Rumours of the mid eighties that Israel, in league with India, was interested in preemptively defanging Pakistan before it went nuclear strengthen the possibility of Israel as interrogator to be credited with starting India off on its deep state journey. Since Israel is a state with a well regarded intelligence apparatus, including for operations under conditions of plausible deniability, it is easy to envisage intelligence exchanges between the two sides in which the deep state idea might have been brought up by self-interested Israel.

Connecting the dots

Joseph connects the dots since the origins of the deep state, serving to confirm the long-standing suspicion that there has been an ideological capture of the intelligence and, later, the policing arm of the Indian state, by hindutva forces. Joseph - courageously in today’s context – rightly sees an assault on India’s democracy in this subversion of the Indian state by an ideology and right wing political forces.

Presumably, on receiving the advice from foreign quarters, not only were Pakistani fissures exploited, such as in Afghanistan if Pakistani protestations beginning with Sharm es Shaikh are to be believed, but their undoubted interference in India magnified to a degree by ‘black operations’ of our very own implicating Muslims that they could be soundly arraigned for support of terrorism, thereby placing them in the international doghouse. The ‘Gujarat model’ needs fleshing out to add an internal security adjunct to its better known economic and developmental version revealed as vacuous under the double whammy of a faltering economy and Covid.

India’s procedural democracy enables hindutva forces to argue that their election victories reflect the popular will. What Joseph exposes is that the popular will is a manufactured one based on the contrived linkage between India’s minority and Pakistani intelligence shenanigans. He puts paid to the narrative that India’s minority served to furnish perpetrators for Pakistan’s terrorism by proxy in India. Even for Kashmir this is only partially true, where the Kashmiri militancy has Indian roots and is at best fanned from without. In the Indian hinterland, the official - and popular - deep state propagated picture of minority perpetrated terrorism is chimera.

The deep state has apparently used the state’s plentiful and unaudited intelligence resources for furthering the narrative in its information operations targeting India’s citizens and the voting public. This perspective takes the sheen off the election victories. India’s credentials as a substantive democracy cannot be taken seriously howsoever touted, as was the case last month in the august halls of the General Assembly in New York. It is this convergence between the right wing and the state apparatus that constitutes the ‘silent coup’, the apt title of Joseph’s book.   

The problem is that the current-day national security elite has so much to hide that it would not like to see the regime that provides it impunity to depart from power, whatever be the national mood and mindset. The run up to the last national elections are a case to point, when the Pulwama episode was engineered to reverse the tide of popular disapproval of the regime stemming from its demonetization and like fiascos. Now that the deep state has been laid out to dry by Joseph, it would be apprehensive skeletons will spill out as part of any future detoxification. This makes it only more likely that the deep state will figure even more prominently in the regime’s calculus in future. Consequently, though the problem has been identified, it cannot be said that a democratic solution can be easily applied.

On this count, Joseph’s has been a national service for outing India’s deep state and mainstreamising a thought that has been present in the minds of India’s Muslims and its alternative strategic community for long. India’s strategic community will be judged on how it assimilates Joseph’s findings, interpretations and conclusions.