https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/18172/The-Crisis-in-the-Indian-Deep-State
http://kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=98483 20 Jan 2020

Unedited version

The crisis in the Indian deep state

The deep state is familiar to Indians as being associated with the Pakistan army and its intelligence agencies running of the state there. Recently, President Trump’s fulminations against an American deep state alerted Indians to the phenomenon that it is not one confined to military dictatorships next door but sister liberal democracies also suffer likewise.

To the usual suspects from the marginalized, alternative strategic community, this is not news. However, most Indians were surprised when the opposition Congress party tacitly averred to an Indian deep state in its press conference on the arrest of Jammu and Kashmir police officer Davinder Singh.

In real time, the heavy artillery was deployed for damage control with the lapdog media and long-known intelligence name droppers, like Praveen Swami, being put to what they are best at – obfuscate and putting out a sanitized narrative.

In this official narrative, Davinder Singh succumbed to the usual blight of the police, the inducement of pelf, by taking to ferrying militants – terrorists if you will. He was apprehended by the Kashmir police red handed. Regime apologists quickly had it that there was little to it than a cop gone rogue.

The alternative narrative had it that their suspicion of an Indian deep state existing, if not thriving, stood vindicated. The alternative narrative is worth reprise in order that Indians take a measure if national security is at all well served by the deep state.

In the instant case, the alternative narrative it that there is much more to the parliament attack than met the eye of the courts. Davinder Singh’s role was one such. Afzal Guru in a parting statement in writing had indicated that Singh had put him to aid one of those killed in the parliament terror attack. That this lead had not been investigated thereafter only hardened suspicion. The Kashmir police’s seeming ignorance of the accusation in its press conference on Singh’s arrest only serves to reinforce.

Both cops of Delhi’s special cell who were the face of the parliament attack investigation died separately under suspicious circumstances. Rajbir Singh who had a reputation as an encounter specialist - short hand for custodial killer - died while engaged in a corrupt deal. The other, Mohan Chand Sharma, likely stopped friendly fire at another badly-executed alleged custodial killing in the infamous fake encounter at Batla House. 

The sense that there is something to hide is furthered by the National Investigative Agency (NIA) readying to take over Singh’s case. The agency has acquired the reputation so far that it only helps cover up tracks of majoritarian terrorists.

This brings one to the second piece of evidence in this narrative of the deep state. The NIA has let off Naba Kumar Sarkar, aka Swami Aseemanand, for his self-confessed participation in acts of majoritarian terror in the Mecca Masjid, Ajmer Dargah and Samjhauta Express blast cases. It’s looking the other way in the Malegaon blast case has helped one well-known terrorist to be elevated to parliament by the ruling party.

A sister agency, that sports the moniker ‘caged parrot’, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), has not pursued the case that Justice Loya was engaged in at his CBI court when he died in suspicious circumstances. It dropped the charges that allowed Home Minister Amit Shah to walk free in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter killing. The cops involved under DG Vanzara include a rapist-murderer, testifying to justice being ill-served for Sohrabuddin’s wife killed alongside.

The alternative narrative has it that Sohrabuddin’s killing had to do with covering up any links to the political murder of a former home minister of Gujarat, Haren Pandya. Pandya was said to have spilled the beans to human rights organizations on the right wing conspiracy behind the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat. The rest, as they say, is history with the then chief minister rising to becoming a two-time prime minister today.

In the alternative narrative, this political journey from the province to Lutyen’s Delhi is the clinching evidence. The start of the journey was littered with Muslim bodies, including that of a nineteen year old girl supposedly killed in encounter with terrorists out to gun down the provincial chief minister allegedly presided over the pogrom.

Modi’s tough-on-security image took form then. A poor security situation in several terror attacks in the mid 2000s helped. The adverse security situation itself was one conjured up with magnification of terror attacks, not only by several perpetrated by majoritarian terrorists, but by the media ceding its investigative faculties.

Even the terror attack of singularly horrifying proportions, Mumbai 26/11, has an underreported underside. That the Hemant Karkare-led heroes of the anti-majoritarian terror investigation were suspiciously shot dead in the attack is a pointer. Outspoken testimony of a retired inspector general of the Mumbai police with several leads to the contrary has not made a dent in the popular narrative that solely has Pakistan at its cross hairs.

Clearly, the conjuring up of the image based on a misleadingly poor security situation could not have been without help from within the security establishment. In those years, a Congress-led government was in power.

This points to a deep state, furthering an agenda outside that of the state, yet from within its confines: in this case manufacturing of a security situation to help midwife its chosen champion to power.

The choice of Modi for the role was made easier by the corporate sector falling in line by the end 2000s.

In the popular narrative, the security situation was vitiated by Pakistani complicity and an internal hand, whether of Kashmiris in that benighted state or of Muslim sleeper cells in the Indian hinterland. This keyed into the Hindutva narrative of Muslims having external loyalties and helped consolidate a vote bank from among majority Hindus behind Modi as the Hindu Hriday Samrat.

It is probable that the twinning of the Pakistan and Muslim minority security predicaments of the Indian state gave rise to the deep state. The eighties and nineties saw their aversion to Pakistan’s interference in India’s internal security. They were less than enamoured by India’s hapless reaching out to Pakistan through the nineties. They finally got their act together as a right wing government took the helm at the turn of the century. It gave them the space necessary for putting together a hard-line counter to Pakistan, with their professional expertise in intelligence operations to the fore – of which the parliament attack is epitome.

With the reins passing on to the UPA in the subsequent decade, these denizens – comprising at various junctures busy bodies from groups within the national security complex with extensions into their respective retired fraternities – went dissident. The term deep state was apt for the period.

However, in the Modi years, with the doyen of the dissidents in the UPA years, Ajit Doval, being rewarded with the national security adviser chair, the deep state has gone mainstream. This is their victory of sorts, but also one of their antagonists, the Pakistani deep state counterparts, who are counter-intuitively perhaps happy that India has now come to resemble them all the more.

The apprehension of Davinder Singh suggests that there is now an alternative deep state, wary of the workings of the erstwhile deep state now ensconced in power.

Singh’s apprehension is likely their preemption of yet another plot in the Pulwama mould, this time to spring the Modi government out of a tight spot it has got into with the counter citizenship amendment act protests in time for it to retrieve from precarity faced with the Delhi and West Bengal elections.

REPOSTED FROM SIX YEARS BACK IN LIGHT OF
https://thewire.in/politics/india-citizenship-amendment-protests-struggle-observations-from-the-past

http://www.milligazette.com/print/issue/1-15-march-2013/6

Afzal Guru: The Man Who Knew Too Much

A wit’s answer to the question that is set to become an eternal one: ‘Why did they hang Afzal Guru?’, reads: ‘Afzal Guru was hanged because the Indian law doesn't allow electric chair, lethal injection, stoning to death, guillotine or any other form of execution.’ However, there is another straight answer: He knew too much. He had already exposed the Indian state’s behavior in Kashmir in his pleadings for justice over the years. But the true face of the state is unremarkable. He knew more. He was the exposed link into a chain of subterfuge leading into the STF (Special Task Force), a unit of Kashmiri rebels who turned coat.

He had pointed this out while alive referring to a certain ‘Tariq’ in the shadowy world of the renegade rebels who set the stage for India to prevail in Kashmir by systematically killing their former comrades and their supporters using fair means and foul. The outfit called Ikhwan was inducted into the police to regularize them. Their notoriety was such that one campaign promise of a political party that won in the polls in 2002 was that they would be disbanded. They were rechristened instead, regularized and hopefully more disciplined since. That Pakistani trained jihadis were degenerate and their terror acts reprehensible, the cliché ‘fight fire with fire’ provided legitimacy to such paramilitary outfits. In that troubled era in their heyday they served to undertake the ‘dirty war’ on behalf of the state.

The ‘conspiracy theory’ needs airing at this juncture. Was the STF used, and did it, in turn, use Afzal Guru for nefarious purpose? Spelling out the conspiracy theory is necessary. This has been done competently elsewhere by the likes of Arundhati Roy and Nirmalangshu Mukherjee. It is with reason they have titled the volume in which their case appears: 13 December, a Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament(Penguin India, pp. 233, Rs. 200, 2006). The very term ‘conspiracy’ is a way to marginalize what could well be the truth. The fact that no inquiry has gone into the parliamentary attack, the truth has not been plumbed. With Afzal gone, it is now also probably beyond reach.

As with any ‘strange case’, it is best to begin with the motives. Parliament attack led up to the Indian military mobilization. That the mobilization stopped at the border and did not cross it suggests more than just statesmanship on Prime Minister Vajpayee’s part. It indicates a strategy, one premeditated and not one thought up at the spur of the moment in the crisis brought on by the dastardly attack. Crisis environments do not lend themselves to cool heads. Stopping at the border was  cool headed decision. That can only have been induced by a predetermined plan of action. In effect, the conspiracy theory has it that the parliament attack was a doing of the intelligence agency put to it by the national security apparatus at the apex level. The one who could have more information on this, the then national security adviser and principal secretary, Mr. Brajeah Mishra, is now no more to confirm this. That in his absence his denial can be anticipated makes the theory a ‘conspiracy theory’.

The diplomatic coercion - coercive diplomacy in strategic terms –mounted thereafter also needed a trigger. Pakistan had crept back into American good books with 9/11. India that had begun courting the US ever since it burst its way into the nuclear club, felt left out in the cold. It needed to embarrass Pakistan, snap America out of its Musharraf infatuation. India needed a trigger. A trigger could not have waited for a bunch of obliging terrorists to come round and timelystorm the parliament. India required instead manufacturing a trigger. This is where the STF comes in.

Given the nature of the violent conflict on in Kashmir at the time, the existence of detention centers is well known. That these would have had inmates with very little chance of seeing freedom once again can also be conceded. Consider that in case a few of these inmates – who were incarcerated since they wanted to harm India – were given a choice of dying a death they had always imagined for themselves, one of a jihadi, how many would have agreed to the proposal. It is obvious that there would be at least some wanting a crack at India, dying in a blaze of imagined glory rather than blindfolded in front of a death squad.  It can be surmised that there would have been no shortage of recruits from those dark chambers. All it needed now was to put together the supporting cast and the equipment, and have a cover story. It is here that unfortunate Afzal figures in the story. The rest as they say is history; but most of it unwritten, deliberately kept unknown, and now, unknowable.

If this is too implausible, then the second manner such a show can be put together is to insert double agents into terror groups. They can then be manipulated into conducting outrages that they are intent on in any case and the manipulator may wish carried out for own political purposes. For instance, in a famous case in Handwara, an SPO induced a couple of unemployed youth to go into a forest after giving them weapons with the promise that a jihadi armed group awaited their joining the group in the forest. The gullible duo went into the forest only to be shot down by the Rashtriya Rifles ambush party conveniently placed on the track to intercept them. Thus, all went home happy: the RR for their brave ambush; the SPO for his information on jihadi movement in the forest and the duo as martyrs to everyone’s final home. This is not an unknown tactic in intelligence circles. In the US, there is record of agents penetrating jihadi internet sites and manipulating net warriors into planning jihadi attacks, based on which they have been arraigned before the law for terror. Their incarceration would not have happened otherwise had the netizen been otherwise engaged in purveying or consuming extremism, as distinct from planning or participating in terror.  It is therefore not impossible for intelligence agencies to carry out terror attacks by proxy. Indian agencies, to their credit, are no exception.

Afzal therefore had to go. The shortcomings in his trial are now well known. The unacceptable reason for his hanging – the demand of the ‘collective conscience’ – is reversion to the bygone days of human sacrifice. He would have gone earlier had the ruling formation and its lead party of the period of the parliament attack returned to power in 2004. They had much to hide. The Congress that has been around since needed him alive to keep the pressure on that party, now in opposition. However, the tide having turned against the Congress to the extent the writing is on the wall, a human sacrifice was decreed for its revival. This explains the timing of Afzal’s departure. As for the Congress, it will prove an insincere act equivalent to the opening of the locks of Babri Masjid the last time it was under siege.

Perhaps dark clouds overhead in that era – nuclear tests, Kandahar hijack, fidayeen attacks, Kargil War, Chittisingpora massacre, Srinagar assembly bombing, right wing rule, 9/11, military rule in the neighbor etc – made the intelligence games necessary. These are games nations play since Chanakyan times. Machivelli testifies that these are indulgences of princes. When elephants fight, grass suffers. Afzal Guru was but another blade of grass.

http://www.milligazette.com/news/16526-the-minority-security-problematic

The minority security problematic


As India heads to elections, the security dynamic of the world’s largest minority looms as one of the principle electoral considerations. While it is understandably so for the minority in question – India’s multiple Muslim communities spread across its subcontinent sized expanse – it also necessarily impacts the larger questions in India’s national security relating to internal security and the internal-external linkages, in particular, India’s Pakistan policy.

The first salvo has already been fired by the central government, using the other ‘caged parrot’ the National Investigation Agency (NIA) (the original as per the august Supreme Court being the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)). The NIA trotted up yet another success in unveiling yet another Islamic State (IS) inspired cell in India’s Hindi heartland. The ever-reliable Praveen Swami – whose low profile lately had led one to believe he was on sabbatical – was brought out to inform that this is the 64th cell dismantled by the NIA in the Modi tenure.

Never mind that the supposed rocket launcher presented as evidence was found to be a hydraulic jack used to lift tractor trolleys. It did not prevent an intrepid researcher in a think tank in the national capital to show up on twitter the utility of the pipe in rocket making by drawing attention to the improvisations that occur in the conflict in Syria, the area of specialization of the young researcher. We are told the recovered sutli bomb and matchsticks were intended to take out the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters in New Delhi (‘No comments’ was NIA comment on a query), among other targets such as easy-to-guess-who among VIPs. At least twice earlier, Narendra Modi has been in crosshairs, or so we have been told: once earlier by a terrorist squad that included a now-dead 19 year old girl and, lately, by urban naxals. Apparently, their plans were in the pipeline since 2009. It begs the question why they were waiting out the Modi tenure.

Needless to add, numerous precedents suggest that the high profile arrests will be followed a few years down the line by their quiet release, remarked only in liberal media and by avid Muslim lawyers keeping up the tradition of martyr Shahid Azmi, who lent his skills to defending Muslim convicts jailed at best for being Muslim and needed as sacrifice for the political ascendance of cultural nationalism and its champions. That the finest actor of his generation – Rajkumar Rao - portrayed his struggle in the award winning Shahid testifies to the epic dimensions of the struggle (jihad if you will).

It is no wonder the NIA director and prime minister name-sake, YC Modi, is front runner for the upcoming vacancy in the CBI, the incumbent, Alok Verma, having been put in cold storage a couple of months prior when he took on the original frontrunner, his deputy and prime minister acolyte, Rakesh Asthana, for corruption. While Asthana had inquired into the burnt coaches of the Sabarmati Express pronouncing their burning along with their human occupants, as a product of the conspiracy at Godhra, YC Modi, was part of the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigation Team that pronounced the then chief minister had having no negative role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

This lengthy introduction is intended to kill two birds with one stone.

It points to the vulnerability of the Muslim minority to predation by the instruments of the state. As the above detail notes, the assault on institutions over the past four and half years has included placement of those subscribing to the political agenda of right wing formations and/or united in their devotion for Messiah Modi – such as that of retired super-cop and Gujarat’s very own Ab tak Chappan, DG Vanzara – at the helm of rule of law institutions. These institutions then lend themselves to the majoritarian, Hindutva project of Othering of the minority community, essential prerequisite in their world view to uniting Hindus, seen as a disparate majority.

Thus the minority security problematic is double fold. It is not quite what it is made out to be in mainstream strategic discourse and by the lap-dog media. This popular narrative has it that the minority is susceptible to inducement of religious extremists and liable to be manipulated by extra-regional forces and a friendly neighbourhood intelligence agency that has operatives ten feet tall. The security problematic is therefore not only to bust this widely and long fostered impression but to reveal its antecedents as part of the cultural nationalist reset of India. This amounts to mainstreaming a ‘conspiracy theory’, a double bind.

The sudden IS advent in the cow-dust belt was complemented by the invasion by IS flag waving masked unidentified men into Srinagar’s hoary Jama Masjid. Their antecedents are now known as yet, but the intrusion prompted permission for an unusual rally by separatist forces in Kashmir against the attempt to capture the political plank of the subnationalist struggle by global religious extremists. That Kashmir is perpetually in the grey zone of intelligence activity (Arundhati Roy is entirely believable on this in her last bestseller), the jury is out on whether the intrusion was prompted by the intelligence agency from across the border or within it. Since it makes little sense for Pakistan to be at cross purposes with separatists, the finger rather points inwards. It makes a great deal of sense for Indian intelligence agencies to put under cloud the subnationalist aspirations of Kashmiri Muslims. Associating their struggle with the almost-defunct extremism in the Levant helps perpetuate the jackboot over a territorial space having a localized majority of the minority community. It also contributes to the Othering process, with the association with India’s longstanding foe, Pakistan, reinforcing the fifth column myth. In any case, the conflict conditions that give rise to extremism witnessed elsewhere to the west continue in Kashmir, making for a pull factor for the IS.

The Hindutva project has been on for at least two decades, going back to the first tenure of the right wing led coalition. It continued under the intervening United Progressive Alliance. Those charged with political oversight had little intrinsic political weight, reliant as they were on the hangover of the ‘family’ name. So much so that Salman Khursheed, a minister in the UPA government, has gone on to admit that his party has ‘blood on its hands’. It did not follow through with the necessary rigour on leads that could have prevented the Modi wave, such as in the case of the murder of Haren Pandya, a political rival of Narendra Modi in his early days as chief minister.

The murder has interesting legacy in that Haren Pandya’s alleged killers, Sohrabuddin, was killed in an alleged encounter – while UPA presided at Delhi. Sohrabuddin’s alleged killer cops from Gujarat and Rajasthan were let off recently, even as their political masters - whose alleged bidding they were carrying out – had walked free earlier. This closes the chapter for want of evidence in which ruling party head, Amit Shah, figured prominently and which included twists such as the untimely death of CBI judge Brijgopal Loya.

This seeming diversion is to highlight that the situation is rather grim. If the UPA’s ten years could not reverse the onward march of the Hindutva project and rein in its foot soldiers, the Modi period has allowed them full play. Muslim lynchings are merely the visible spectrum. A subterranean rot can be anticipated. Detoxification would be challenging. But that is to get the horse ahead of the cart. First is to get into place an administration sensitive to the task, with the previous UPA tenure hardly lending confidence if this is at all possible.

Renewed Muslim bashing compounds this. It is not a coincidence that the news of another seaside terror attack on-the-make surfaced recently. The cow brigade tried at the eve of the provincial elections to spring another Muzaffarnagar 2013, this time to coincide with the gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat at Bulandshahr. Unfortunately for conspirators, overzealousness led to the killing of a cop and unwanted national attention. A riot attempt botched at inception, the BJP lost three Hindi heartland states. Such attempts can be expected to continue under the benign over-watch of the saffron-clad Ajay Mohan Bisht (aka. Yogi Adityanath) led provincial administration. The Kumbh congregation over the coming months provides a backdrop. It is not unthinkable for a warped intelligence mind to think up a terror threat to the gathering and put polarization back as an election gimmick. It is a curious oversight on part of NIA spin doctors that in the prospective targets of the IS module busted late last month, the Kumbh mela did not figure. For a strategic actor, that the terrorist ‘gang’ (as per the NIA press release) was primed to go prematurely on New Year’s eve suggests there can only be more to the story.

As anticipated by many commentators, the Modi-Shah duo is left with polarization alone as its final card. The Ram Mandir issue, minority-perpetrated terror and the National Register of Citizens – each with a handy minority angle - are available as issues. The pulling out of the Bhartiya Janata Party from the coalition with the People’s Democratic Party in Kashmir was timed to ensure that the elections in Jammu and Kashmir are with the national elections, allowing for six months of governor’s rule followed up with president’s rule. This along with keeping Pakistan’s outstretched hand of late at bay enables the ruling party to orchestrate the inside-outside linkage at will as elections approach. The hyping of the surgical strikes, through the Parv Parakram, is not without purpose.

This is the near term manifestation of minority insecurity. Minority security is intrinsic to national security. National security requires turning the leaf, away from its appropriation by cultural nationalism. India’s minority must engage with questions of national import. A holistic minority security enterprise would require settling of India’s Pakistan problem and the Kashmir question. It would require being abreast of developments on questions of state identity, such as the Rohingya issue or that of the illegal immigration. It is easy to see that this is only possible by a liberal turn to politics and policy making.

Less easy to see is the need for the minority to see its security problematic as an interconnected whole. What is critical to the Assamese and Bengali Muslims in the northeast must exercise Muslim communities elsewhere. The incessant killings of Kashmiri youth – 255 last year - cannot be left unremarked anymore. There has to be minority viewpoint on and minority participation in the national debate of seemingly distant issues as Article 35A, Article 370, the Citizenship (Amendment) bill etc. The underlying logic of creation of a self-regarding minority is to strengthen its own security and national security, of which minority security is subset.

This is easier said. In the current national security problematic, the minority is seen as a security problem. This constitutes the minority security problematic that needs reversing.