London: Hurst Publishers, 2022. 306 pp. US$23.00, paper. ISBN 9781787387997.
Anyone who wants to understand India’s politics—non-specialists but also scholars—ought to pay attention to the work of that country’s analytical, investigative journalists. Josy Joseph, a distinguished practitioner of that craft, here offers a detailed account of the nefarious actions by police and intelligence services and investigative agencies that do the bidding of politicians. Joseph argues that this “non-military arm of the security establishment” (4) constitutes India’s “deep state.” These supposed guardians of the democratic order have often done democracy and ordinary citizens, grave damage: “They raid, harass, eavesdrop, torture and kill” (5).
Joseph’s analysis, based on a career of ground-level reporting, ranges widely over recent decades, and across Indian regions. The author’s encounters with the security establishment are sometimes chronicled, including offers of inducements to influence his copy. But far more often, he provides accounts of the unjustifiable sufferings of individuals at the hands of state agencies.
Joseph comments on events under different ruling parties: Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975–1977), the anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi in 1984, the Indian incursion into Sri Lanka in 1987, and events in Kashmir on multiple occasions. He then turns to the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu militants at Ayodhya in 1992 and the Islamophobia that emerged after the 9/11 attacks by Muslim extremists in the US and on India’s Parliament in 2001. He moves on to the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat where Narendra Modi was chief minister in 2002, and Modi’s autocratic rule in the state thereafter, to the serial bombings of 2006 in western India by Muslim extremists—a blast reliably attributed to Hindu extremists which has been downplayed—and Pakistani militants’ attack on Mumbai in 2008. He concludes with a discussion of Modi’s authoritarian actions after becoming prime minister in 2014.
Much of Joseph’s commentary focuses on the confusion and “structural flaws” of how security services responded—not least in their dealings with the media. Confident that they are beyond accountability, these agencies feed information that cannot be verified. Such interactions lead many journalists to believe that they are privileged members of a secret club, and carry a certain burden of saving the country, so they end up amplifying fake narratives and unverifiable information which reduces them to pawns. In reality, the Indian security establishment was floundering. Its deep-seated biases, institutional decay, and lack of accountability had forced it down a rabbit hole. Besides the profuse inflow of fake inputs into their mammoth information network, agencies were also engaged in turf battles, rather than cooperating in the hunt for the terrorists (50).
The author’s accounts of the plight of individuals swept up in the aggressive, sometimes frantic actions of the security agencies make his narrative quite vivid. But at times, this obscures his overall assessments of various episodes. For this reviewer, this is forgivable, given the deeply troubling nature of these reports.
But one further concern is more worrying. Readers might conclude from the accounts of missteps and excesses by these agencies over many years that there is broad continuity between earlier periods and Modi’s time as prime minister since 2014. This would be a serious misperception. A close reading of the text reveals that Joseph is well aware that since 2014, things have changed and degenerated, drastically. His discussion of these more recent trends can only be taken to mean that a new and fundamentally different kind of political system has emerged. Abuses by investigative agencies and other arms of the security establishment have multiplied so vastly, and become so brazen and brutish, that such a basic change has occurred.
This book is titled How to Subvert a Democracy, and the actions of the Modi regime fully qualify as an attempt to achieve that vile goal. Modi’s authoritarian effort to destroy liberal democracy has made very considerable headway. By comparison, the regrettable abuses seen before 2014 pale into insignificance. Modi’s arrival as prime minister immediately inspired draconian proposals from certain security agencies. They understood his autocratic appetites from his time in charge of Gujarat, and they sought to appeal to them. Joseph explains how, with encouragement from the top, they laid the groundwork, without evidence, for assaults on opposition parties and leaders, civil society organizations, critics of the regime, and merely independent voices.
As an eminent reporter, Joseph writes from one of the major battlegrounds of this new, dark era: the media. He chronicles the brutalities visited upon others such as violence against minorities, wildly exaggerated charges, and actions against innocents based on flimsy accusations backed by planted evidence. But journalists were in the thick of it. Reporters Without Borders have included Modi in its list of “predators of press freedom.” Its press freedom index in 2022 ranked India 142nd, alongside Myanmar. In 2023, it sank to 161st, below Afghanistan. So Joseph knows whereof he speaks. This is a valuable account from the receiving end of this new vicious new order. It cries out for our attention.
James Manor
University of London, London