How the government’s abuse of security agencies could ‘destroy India’ – Josy Joseph with Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
The misuse of India’s security agencies for political gain is today so commonplace that no one bats an eyelid when hearing of an Income Tax “survey” on a news organisation or an Enforcement Directorate raid against a political opponent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Yet even for those familiar with the depressingly routine extra-judicial killings by Indian police departments or the everyday brutality unleashed on marginalised communities, Josy Joseph’s new book – The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State – still has the capacity to shock.
Over the course of the book, Joseph recounts the remarkable lengths to which India’s police-intelligence complex goes to do the bidding of political masters, including knowingly arresting and torturing ordinary Muslims to cover up their failure to prevent terror attacks, the seeding of fake narratives and involvement in terror conspiracies to advance communal agendas and the stubborn refusal to hold anyone in the security world accountable…. I spoke to Joseph about… why he believes that the way India’s security agencies operate today pose a danger to India’s democracy….
