The Silent Coup: A History Of India's Deep State

India is justly proud of a parliamentary democracy that has never been threatened by a military coup. No mean feat in a neighbourhood  were coups are common and notions of constitutionality shaky. However, for decades now, India's democratic standing has been steadily declining. An international analysis recently rated the country as only 'partly  free', while another deemed it an 'electoral autocracy'.

Josy Joseph investigates this decline  and comes away with key insight: that process of confronting militancy has wraped the system. As insurgencies erupted across India, and grew increasingly more sophisticated in the 1980's and 90's, the security establishment struggled to keep up. Increasingly overwhelmed, the police forces, intelligence agencies, federal investigation agencies, tax departments and the  like came up with ingenious-at times sinister -- solutions: from faking and framing evidence to staging massive terror attacks and even creating terrorist organisations. Over time, militancy became a flourishing, multi-faceted business enterprise.

From the Kashmiri militancy to the Sri Lankan civil war, from the attack on Mumbai to the long-term unrest in the Northeast, India's 'war on terror' has made its security institutions more nationalistic and chauvinistic, and, invetiably, more corrupt.