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If there is one thing in our lives that is unseen, it is the role of the state.
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There is nothing quite as oppressive as a modern state, the apparatus of government
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And yet, we have normalized that oppression.
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Now, the state has a monopoly on violence, and you could argue that it needs to, because
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that is how it protects our rights.
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That is the one legitimate purpose of the state, right?
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To protect our rights, to serve us for we are the masters.
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In reality, we are less citizens than subjects.
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When India gained independence in 1947, we got rid of the British.
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But we did not get freedom from oppression.
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That same state apparatus that was used to control us in colonial times was maintained
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by our new brown skinned masters.
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If anything, it became more brutal and more sophisticated.
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And yeah, sure, we have elections, but democracy is not just about voting.
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You also need mechanisms to safeguard the rights of citizens and to hold the state accountable.
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Those mechanisms don't exist.
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Every election is basically a competition between rival mafias to see who can rule the
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people and extract all that they can for whatever time they have in power.
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The rewards are great and they are enabled by the security state.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Josie Joseph, a pioneering investigative journalist who's written an
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excellent book named The Silent Coup, a history of India's deep state.
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In this book, he examines and exposes how India's security state has so many unseen
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layers to it and how it rules our lives and is damaging our society.
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We have seen different aspects of the security state in play.
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We know the corrupt rent-seeking police, though most of us thankfully don't have to deal with
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them beyond bribes or traffic signals.
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The rule of law is absent in India, but the police is all-powerful.
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So is the taxman, often used by the political class as a tool to subjugate those who don't
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And there are a range of other investigative agencies whose incentives are tailored only
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towards pleasing their political masters.
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And what they get up to with the unbridled power that they have is staggering.
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The Silent Coup is a book you must read for that reason and I enjoyed my conversation
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Before we get to it though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
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In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
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which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
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I loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
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I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
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because I wrote about many different things.
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Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
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Only now I am doing it through a newsletter.
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I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
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regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
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I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
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So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
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Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
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You don't need to go anywhere.
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So subscribe now for free.
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The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
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Josie, welcome to the scene in the unseen.
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It's a great privilege.
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Yeah, I've been waiting for a long time to ask you actually, I think we met at the Bangalore
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Lit Fest a couple of years ago and I said, hey, come on some time and we'll discuss Feast
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But now we finally get to talk when your new excellent book is out, which everyone should
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read and I heard that the first print run is also sold out.
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So congratulations for that.
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Before we sort of start talking about the book per se, I'd love to know a little bit
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We are actually, I think, born in the same year, 1973.
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I heard you reveal your year in this TEDx talk you gave.
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So tell me a little bit about where you grew up, what your early years were like, that
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journey until you eventually became a journalist.
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Amit, I was born in a very lower middle class family by the backwaters in Alleppey.
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My father was an accountant, tax consultant.
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I always saw this great debate at home about my dad's wild ambition for education and children
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and obsession with education.
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My mother was more like, you know, saying that, look, pursuit of happiness is being
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happy for today, right?
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So I always saw this great debate of pursuit of happiness between the two of them.
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But together they ensured that, and we are four siblings, and you know, my dad, when
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he heard about Saini schools, someone from my village went and became a teacher in Saini
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So my father got obsessed with it and he tried with my elder brothers who couldn't, first
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one was overage, second one was underage, whatever, you know.
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Anyway, I became the guinea pig and after my first five years in schooling, I landed
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in Saini school, Tuandrum.
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It's thanks to Socialist India, the government subsidized public school education that I
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could speak English, I could learn English.
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Until then, I was in a Malayalam medium school.
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I'm very accurately aware of the privileges of state subsidy that is done and the impact
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it has on people like us.
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And I'm very proud of the fact that, you know, despite it's being called a Saini school,
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I think it's a great public school for the poor and middle class, bright kids.
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And schools, Saini schools across India continues to produce hundreds of very outstanding, thousands
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of very outstanding professionals into military and outside.
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And I think a lot of values are shared.
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And it is not overstating a fact to say that you take a sample of Saini school products
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and you'll find them unusually high on integrity, on morals, commitment to nationalism, et cetera,
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So I went to Saini school till twelfth, I came back home, my parents, my mother especially
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wanted, I don't do the person of happiness debate, so mother wanted me to be home.
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So I went to study B.Sc in mathematics, I was quite a good student in mathematics.
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But after two years of doing well in mathematics, I realized that my heart lies in writing and
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Anyway, I completed mathematics B.Sc and came to Delhi in the hope of becoming a civil
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And I did the usual rounds of civil service training institutes.
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And I think I paid money at Rao's academy also to enroll.
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But you know, one of those days happenstance happened and I landed up in Delhi midday office,
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John Dale used to be the editor, a common acquaintance had introduced me to him, I went
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So when I was there, he said the Rajan Pillai, the biscuit tycoon who was running Britannia
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and who was in a big legal corporate war, he had just disappeared from Singapore and
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there was a manhunt forum, et cetera.
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So he asked me to write a profile of Rajan Pillai and I wrote that.
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And that changed my life, I never sat for civil service exam, I never wanted to be one
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again because the kick of writing, the fun of it all just hooked me and the first article
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got me a lot of attention also, a lot of local attention, you know what I'm saying.
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So I've been a journalist since then.
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To satisfy parents that I'm studying, I did an evening course PG Diploma in Journalism
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in YMCA where one of the teachers couldn't even, so even despite I topping his paper,
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he couldn't recognize me because I would very hardly go to classes, you know, I was busy
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in my journalism, practical journalism.
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That's how I became a journalist, so there is no other fancy story to it.
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It's a very average Indian story of this above average student from an ordinary or a poor
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family managing to get to the city with education and starting off with the limited options
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available to us in those days, you know, I'm talking about the early 90s.
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That's it, liberalization was just happening around, but the benefits were to raise the
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media houses, journalism salaries were very low, yeah, that's all.
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That's not all, there's a lot there that leads me to think of future questions.
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Firstly, I'm intrigued by the values you mentioned at Sanik School.
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So what were those kind of values in the sense that you say that today you meet, you know,
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anybody from Sanik School, you can sort of that integrity is always there and so on.
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So tell me a little bit more about that and then when you encounter people outside of
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that environment, when you first did, did that difference become stark?
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Was there an awareness that there is one way that we have been taught to or that we have
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imbibed in terms of how we think about the world and what is actually happening out there,
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which in a sense, you spend the rest of your life uncovering what is actually happening
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out there is something totally different.
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Tell me a little bit about these sort of clash of values and you know what that was like.
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I don't know Amit if you went to a boarding school.
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I was for a while a day scholar in a school that was also a boarding school, so yeah.
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So if you go to a boarding school, you are forever, you are a student, you know, and
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So I think one of the things that boarding schools does to you is that it becomes a very
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And so you are almost naked before them for a lifetime.
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So I think there's a lot of, you know, if I may put it in a positive way, peer pressure
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to be good and to do good.
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This is one of my theories about, I got several theories about boarding school, one of it
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is this, second is I told every Sunday morning, boarding school boys have to rub their bathrooms
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instead of going to church, I like to do that.
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So I think the bonding that you create in boarding schools have a very positive impact.
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But there's another aspect, which is where Indian military and military ethos come in.
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We can criticize the military for a lot of things, but I think Indian military, luckily
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for India, has built a very strong moralistic framework.
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It's not 100% perfect, there are problems with it.
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So because the senior school was run by the military officers, they bring in a certain
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kind of idealism, which is quite naive in many ways.
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And there is a strong foundation to it.
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And I think the third factor to add to it is that, you know, between all of us, the
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boarding school gang, we are almost every day talking to each other, right?
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The conversations, the concerns we share are the same.
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The appreciations I receive, they are my biggest fans and supporters.
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So it all comes together.
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And then when I came out into the public life, and even today, very honestly, despite doing
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all the so-called journalism and all that, I still get fooled by a lot of people.
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A lot of people take me for a ride and I find it, sometimes I feel, and I know that somebody
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is taking me for a ride, even when it takes me a lot of time to turn around and tell that
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person, look, enough is enough, you know.
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But that's part of the personality too, I suppose.
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But yeah, it is very stark.
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So I think Indian society, per se, at large, we are an immoral society, not even immoral.
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We can't, you know, when I'm in New Delhi, when I meet with certain kinds of people,
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I think that they can't even make the difference between immoral and moral.
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They're so blinded by the pursuit of wealth and power, which we see all around.
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And to me, it is amusing and it agitates me.
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And maybe that agitation is what helps me to do some stories that I've done or continue
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to do stories that I do.
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Because all of their greed of the politicians or the bureaucrats, all corporates, that greed
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comes at the cost of people like us, people like us meaning the poor, ordinary Indians,
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you know, the ones who go to bed hungry with their stomachs churning.
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So it comes at the cost.
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And a lot of my journalism comes out of it and that anger is something that continues
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to boil in me and despite I being in my late 40s, it hasn't gone down.
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If anything, my anger has only gone up.
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So I'm struck by the use of the word immoral in what you just said.
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And that leads me to a slightly sideways pondering, which is that, you know, one could argue that
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morality is the luxury of those who don't have an empty stomach.
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And otherwise in a really poor country, when you're desperate, when you're scrambling,
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you know, do you really have the luxury to be moral?
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And it, you know, everything comes down to that circumstance.
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And also, many of our values are in fact shaped by the institutions around us and by what
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is actually happening in our society.
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Like one of the musings and one of the questions that I frequently asked people on the show,
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including economists, but you know, you might have a thought on it.
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So I'll air it as well.
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It refers to this old Jagdish Bhagwati observation about how Indians tend to be rent seeking
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while Chinese seek to be profit seeking.
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Profit seeking, meaning obviously that the only way they can make a profit is by making
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someone else better off and it's a positive sum game and blah, blah, blah.
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And I don't know enough about China to know how true that is.
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But Indians certainly are rent seeking in the sense that even today in 2021, a lot of
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people when they think of starting a business, it's the thinking is how do I con somebody,
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isko, you know, chutiya kaise banao, if I might use unparliamentary language.
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And that's kind of how it is.
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And my theory always was that the reason we are in seeking is not something fundamentally
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wrong with our culture, but it's partly a result of the institutions we've had since
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independence when the state had such a domineering role and private enterprise was so suppressed
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that the only way to really get ahead and to make money and all of that was through
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in some way or the other, using the state to make yourself better off for using that
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power to make yourself better off, which is why so many successful capitalists were really
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crony capitalists, not functioning in a free market, but with the hand of the state helping
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Now a significant part of your book also demonstrates how people everywhere are responding to incentives,
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people within the security establishment, bureaucrats, politicians, whatever.
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And indeed, when you were saying you were studying for the civil services, I just wondered
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for a moment that had you joined the civil servants, you know, who knows, maybe you would
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have turned into one of them, but maybe your sanic school values would have shaped you.
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So do you have a comment to make on this?
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See, I think we are not reading the Indian society right when we if we were to say that
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we are rent seekers for a moment, look at history in the broad sense.
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So I don't know if you know this book called, it's called Geography of geniuses, what is
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This is a book where I have it somewhere here, where he argues that geniuses usually you
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find them in clusters in ancient Greek or in Calcutta during the century ago, etc.
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But if you look at India of the 19th, last century's first part, some of the geniuses
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of our times were born or lived from Gandhi to Ambedkar and today when you read their
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debates, their papers, their books, you realize that probably they were an unusual moment
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in history when unusually gifted great people came together and they just disappeared and
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those who followed them did not have the vision or the capability to sustain what they created
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Now even today when we talk about rent seekers, we also have people like the Premji's of
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the world who are doing fantastic work without any compromise and I think we can find a lot
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of businessmen out there who are doing things without being rent seekers, who are doing
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So I don't know what exactly this argument is and I'm not qualified to challenge or
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critique him because he's such a brilliant academic.
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My theory is that the democratic degeneration that has been happening is spreading and degeneration
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has two things that happens.
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One is what you said, which is that when it is degenerating and because we are frustrated
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with the state controls, etc., but in a degenerated society, we take the path of least resistance,
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So you are in a degenerated state and you become one of them.
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Otherwise, standing up to it is not a great idea, it's not good for your health.
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The other thing is when India moved from the socialist state, the import substitution policies,
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etc., into a liberalized economy, we did not make a clean migration into a clean marketplace.
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We just shifted all the crap of that old days into the new marketplace and said, oh, our
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economy is going to boom.
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You look at corridors like Bundelkhand to Delhi, Bihar to Bombay, etc.
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These are modern-day slaves.
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Millions are coming to your cities and they're building your infrastructure.
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Your economic boom is mostly on constructions of apartments, roads, airports, etc.
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So we haven't actually created an entrepreneurial marketplace, which would actually reform and
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As you know, except in Singapore or the world, when you have entrepreneurial class emerging,
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they demand better accountability, etc.
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Except for Bangalore city, I don't know how many citizens is dominated, economy is dominated
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by entrepreneurship and innovations, etc.
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So what I'm saying is that one is that many of the people who would actually want to be
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good in life are forced to do the immoral acts because they want a good night's sleep.
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They want their family to be safe.
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They don't want to be threatened.
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They don't want to face legal challenges, etc.
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The second is over the years from that Gandhian, Nehruvian, Ambedkarite values of unbelievable
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intellect, we have come to a stage where you have leaders who ridicule higher education,
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who ridicule scientific temperament and make all kinds of rubbish claims and you have,
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you are given power away to criminals.
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The state has been virtually captured by criminal elements at various levels.
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You might call them political families or political stars or whatever it is.
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But the reality is that if you really look at them, remove all the aura around them,
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remove the constitutional positions around them.
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They are accused, right accused, cheats.
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So we are not just rent seekers.
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I'm saying there is a good India which is not being allowed to come up and speak.
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That India is only allowed to speak and act in, you know, in conversations with Amit or
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in some literary festivals or in some small groups or on Signal or WhatsApp these days.
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The marketplace and the mainstream of Indian democracy has been taken over by criminals,
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But that doesn't mean that we Indians are all rent seekers.
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I think what Bhagwati kind of meant was exactly what you're saying that this is, you know,
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what the system has created, you've incentivized rent seekers.
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My brief bunch of responses to what you said, one is, of course, I agree about the quality
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of the leaders that emerged in the first part of the last century.
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And I, in fact, wrote a column also once addressing this popular question that why were our freedom
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fighters of such high caliber, where our leaders today are not of the high caliber.
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And my argument was that you just have to look at the incentives, that the people who
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came up then, they had no power to lust for, there were no riches or power at the end of
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They were animated purely by principles, perhaps even the kind of principles that sanic school
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students would approve of, and they were willing to sacrifice a lot for that.
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So obviously you get a certain caliber there.
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So there's a self-selection there.
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Anyone who is devoting their life to that kind of work is obviously going to be a higher
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quality of person, whereas post-independence, what we designed at independence was essentially
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Therefore, you'll get leaders then like that, who are attracted by the lust for power which
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doesn't carry with it safeguards or accountability or any of that, where we are a democracy without
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really being a republic in the true sense.
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I think that's kind of been an issue there.
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And I also agree that, you know, 1991, I would say we didn't liberalize enough.
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We didn't do enough to unleash the entrepreneurial spirits of our people.
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I think it did a lot of good.
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It got your 300 million people out of poverty and all of that.
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But the point is, it was very far from a magic pill, obviously.
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Look at the state of the country, and if anything, we've gone backwards in the last 10 years.
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But we'll kind of come to more details of that direness when we speak about your book.
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I want to go a little back into your past life.
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I do want to talk about your journalistic years.
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But even before that, you mentioned that you did the BSc in math because you had started
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doing it and you said, okay, I'll finish it.
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But you were more interested in writing, which obviously means that you were reading a lot
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because that's how one becomes interested in writing.
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So tell me about the books you read and who influenced you, who were the writers you used
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to look up to during that period.
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Give me some sense of that.
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And when you said you wanted to write, what kind of writing did you want to do?
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Take me into the mind of the teenager, Josie.
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I feel very embarrassed talking about myself too.
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So when we were 25 years after we were out of boarding school, friends were talking about
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There was some kind of recall about who we were as children.
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And I was surprised to know that when I was 11, 12, I used to tell my friends that I want
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I couldn't recall those.
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But everyone else recalled the fact that I was always fond of and I think I was a voracious
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And I think my reading has now come down to more specific reading.
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Yeah, I mean, like any good mallu, you finish Kafka and Camus by the age of 16 and 17, and
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you're wrapping up Marquez and others.
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So they're all brothers for us, right, for all the mallus and bongs.
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So yeah, I mean, we read a lot of Soviet, the communist literature.
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I read all of the Indian Hindu classics, Mahabharata, Ramayana.
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In fact, I know more of Ramayana and Mahabharata than Bible.
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And so classics, of course, and then I switched to very serious reading of the modern and
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postmodern writers when I was, as I was moving into my teenage years, and we had a network
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in school where we all shared, and there are some books, you don't know for what reason
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For example, there was a book by James Mishner called On Poland, if I'm not wrong.
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So it stuck with me about this little country, which is like the, you know, everyone who
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comes to Soviet Union goes back, everybody walks over Poland, right?
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So those kinds of things stuck with me.
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And for a long time in my college years, I was very deeply into serious literature reading
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and magical realism and classics, etc.
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And I think that influences a lot of my writing.
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If you see, I make this very foolish attempts to ape certain creative writing in my nonfiction.
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So yeah, then after that phase, after I came to Delhi, and when I hit kind of a plateau
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reading fiction, and I couldn't, I wasn't very happy with the new fiction stuff that
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And because of journalism, I shifted to reading nonfiction.
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And I don't know what it was, I started reading a lot of history and and biographies.
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And I love large events, I love to read about, you know, so I you'll see a lot of those kind
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Now I read so for the last 20-25 years, except for a few fiction books, I have only read
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nonfiction and nonfiction very seriously and but when you're writing a book, as you know,
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you're reading mostly stuff related to writing because you need to be in that world, right?
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So you know, I was rereading Basharat Peer and Rahul Pandita, etc. for the book.
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And now I'm reading transfer of power papers and a lot of the history books of 4740 because
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I'm working on something new with my team.
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So yeah, now the readings are much more focused.
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Unless stumbled, I don't read fiction anymore.
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But yeah, I've read enough fiction to hold a conversation on Latin American or African
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It's also evident in your writing because I just thought that, you know, reading your
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latest book, the storytelling was excellent in it, you know, which is something narrative
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nonfiction writers over the last 40-50 years have certainly picked up from fiction writing,
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using novelistic techniques, the way you build a story, the way you structure it, all of
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It was very interesting.
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There are interesting things happening, there are back and forths and all of that, which
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So you know, when you joined journalism, what was your notion of what makes for an ideal
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In the sense that I remember back in the 90s, as I reached adulthood and all of that, you
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know, today the internet is ubiquitous, we take it for granted, we can read journalism
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from all over the world.
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That was obviously not the case then we just had the handful of Indian newspapers and those
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weekly news magazines like India Today and Sunday and all to look at.
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So how does one form a model of journalism when you say you, when your friends say you
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wanted to be a journalist before that?
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What was your conception of it?
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What excited you about journalism per se?
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And as you got into it, how did your notion of journalism evolve in a sense?
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Like where do you begin to anchor yourself in terms of the values that journalism should
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have and which is an especially relevant question for me to ask you, because when I look around
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the journalistic landscape today, you seem a little bit of an outlier, which of course
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I mean entirely as a compliment.
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It's interesting that you're asking me this because you know, the first thing I did after
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I landed in Delhi, because I signed a school, we had a well stocked library, not the greatest
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Then I came home where the local college where I did my graduation at a very ordinary library,
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And I would buy those Malayalam magazines and because my Malayalam was poor, so I re-read
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to improve my language.
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When I came to Delhi, the first thing that I did was my brother, who is an army officer.
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I asked him to take me to all the major libraries and we took membership in every one of them.
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So the American Center, the British Library, Sahitya Academy Library, even the Municipal
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Library in Sarojina, etc.
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And for several months before I became a full-time journalist, my job was to go to, I was just
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in and out of libraries.
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I would go spend days, read up, bring books, go back, you know how it is to be.
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And I came to Delhi sometime in November.
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By the summer of next summer, I was into mid-day full-time job.
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Now again, with a lot of these pseudo-intellectual impressions and ambitions, I go into a newsroom
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and my very first feature has this slight, you know, it impresses the crowd around.
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And then I'm writing things about films, I'm comparing Schindler's List and, you know,
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Manir Yatnam's Bombay and people are appreciating.
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And one day, you know, my editor tells me, you are, listen, there is a press conference
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by Madanlal Khurana, the Chief Minister of Delhi, go and attend it.
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I may submit it on the desk, I'm not a reporter.
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So I go with the reporter to attend and he's speaking in Punjabi.
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I couldn't understand a word of it.
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So I came back and told the editor, sir, you know, I can't be a reporter in this city.
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I hardly understand Hindi and Punjabi especially.
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So he said precisely because you don't understand language, you should become a reporter because
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languages do not matter.
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You should be able and capable and confident to report anywhere in the world.
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You only need an interpreter at best, right?
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And a lot of things are said and I know a lot of things that the most crucial observations
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are not based on words.
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He pushed me into reporting and I started reporting on the ground.
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And that is when I woke up to the reality that despite all my family's financial issues
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or struggles, I came from a very cocooned, privileged, democratic society in Kerala where
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it was a stark contrast here.
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Here I was out there in hospitals where children are being stolen.
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I was going to police stations where torture is like a daily routine.
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I was going into government offices and getting these, you know, I mean, they're bargaining
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in front of you, the bribes, etc.
#
The life was different.
#
So, I mean, for me, the wake up happened during those days and I abandoned all my intellectual
#
pretensions and I said, this is the India that I should report and write about.
#
Then I became a reporter and I became a reporter in a very aggressive manner.
#
And since then, I'm very happy to say that till date, I may have not carried stories,
#
but I have not dropped a story because someone could influence me.
#
I refuse to be compromised.
#
I refuse to give in to any threats, intimidations, legal cases, because it makes me angry because
#
we are a very rich country of too many corrupt and poor people.
#
Sometime around that time, I stopped reading fiction.
#
I started getting into understanding what's here and now.
#
And years later, I became a defense correspondent and I was bringing a lot of defense scams
#
and stories, but then I realized that defense is a very small part of the society.
#
So that's when I decided to do a master's where I could learn more subjects and develop
#
And I'm very clear that if our voices don't echo and resonate here and now, it has no
#
I don't want to be a Franz Kafka that I become famous after my death with my novels.
#
I need to be doing my bit to make the society better for my daughter and her generation.
#
So that's a wake up that I had in my 20s.
#
I was chatting with a good friend of mine who happens to be an old colleague of yours,
#
So I called him this morning and I said, tell me a little bit about Josie.
#
And Prem was full of nothing but praise.
#
And one of the first things he said which struck me was that Josie was a quintessential
#
And he said that there are no beat journalists anymore.
#
And obviously in those early years, your beat was security and in fact, the security establishment
#
you've written about in this new book.
#
So a couple of questions there, one, what made you sort of choose that beat?
#
Was it a kind of serendipity that those are the kind of stories you started doing and
#
you just kind of stuck with it?
#
And two, the other thing is that, you know, typically you imagine a beat reporter is someone
#
who, you know, your editor tells you, okay, this is your beat.
#
You're covering housing or you're covering crime or you're covering whatever.
#
And the beat reporter does that till they get moved on to the next beat.
#
But it seems to me that your commitment to your beat also comes out of the kind of conviction
#
that you just articulated, that it was important to do this work, that you were animated by
#
I have been told to do this and so on.
#
So take me a little bit through, you know, your mindset by this beat.
#
What drove you about it?
#
So I'm in midday and by 95, I become a full time reporter reporting municipal issues,
#
local government, whatever.
#
And I get hired by Asian Edge, MJ Akbar hires me, Seema Mustafa is my boss because he's
#
launching Delhi Edge, which is a local reporting section of the paper.
#
I'm the chief reporter there and I'm overseeing the reporting and I'm doing well and I try
#
to do some national stories occasionally.
#
And I broke a few stories in the first 10-year government.
#
I don't know if you recall, there was a proposal to make Sanskrit compulsory in schools and
#
they also wanted to teach kitchen habits to girls.
#
So I broke all those stories and, you know, Akbar was taking a like, you know what I mean,
#
So one of those days, Admiral Vishnu Bhagat was dismissed as a Navy chief and the reporting
#
was largely controlled by the government.
#
And that's when Akbar told me to start reporting on defense.
#
And I got into, so because of that, from day one, besides my Chinese school background
#
and my acquaintance with a lot of good officers, I got right into the heart of the little degeneration
#
in the military-civilian relationship and Kargil happened.
#
So beat reporting is, you know, you can't decide these things.
#
So Kargil happened and I broke a few of the early stories about patrols going missing.
#
And one day when the war is happening, I wrote about Brigadier Surendar Singh, who was then
#
the brigade commander of Kargil, being removed from command, and also his boss being removed
#
Next day, military intelligence chief himself, MIT himself writes a letter to MJ Akbar saying
#
that I had been fooled by an ISI module and they've detected 26 ISI modules which are
#
trying to demoralize the military at, you know, a nation at war.
#
I was immediately taken off the defense beat by my editor and articles came out.
#
Luckily, I didn't get arrested or anything.
#
But 10 days later, I was proved right when army admitted that the transfer actually had
#
So I was getting into the defense and partly the intelligence apparatus because that completes
#
the and the white-collar agencies, right?
#
So I was getting into that segment and I was breaking stories and especially because I
#
was doing stories which were anti-establishment, I got a lot more attention.
#
And that's when Rediff called me as the Kargil war entered, I left because I couldn't stay
#
there because, you know, I was virtually left hanging hung to dry because of a story I brought
#
about Surendar Singh's transfer when my editors couldn't stand with me.
#
So the moment Rediff offer came, I left, I left actually, I think on the day of the ceasefire
#
declaration I left, resigned, went to Rediff and there also Rediff was those days one of
#
the greatest journalism.
#
I think I haven't worked in a more idealistic newsroom than Rediff of those days.
#
We had Nikhil Laxman, Prem Panikkar, Sai, all of Sheila but later.
#
So what happened was that because Rediff was then well funded and all that, you know, there
#
was much more travel budget.
#
And I did my own Padmashi's there, you know, so I would go to Kashmir, stay in a rented
#
house, go and train in militants, go to Nepal, all that.
#
But what it did was because I was not a jingoistic guy, because I was not enamored by military
#
And because I was not taken up by this, you know, crazy story, some of these chaps would
#
try to spin around you.
#
I was always clear headed.
#
So you know, like, sometime I wrote something against army and the army's PRO, not PRO,
#
the ADGP, the senior chap called me and said, we are going to blacklist you.
#
So I said, so the liquor will be sent home.
#
So he said, meaning what?
#
I mean, he was a stiff infantry officer.
#
I said, sir, you're putting me on some list, you said, right?
#
So is it a privilege list where you send liquor home or what is it?
#
He said, don't you understand, I'm going to blacklist you.
#
So I said, sir, who bothers?
#
It's a democracy, right?
#
You, blacklist, brownlist, whatever you want to do it, I'll do my job.
#
But if I'm factually wrong, you should tell me.
#
I still believe that journalism, especially if you're covering security establishment,
#
it cannot be for popularity.
#
And in fact, most of the bosses in agencies want you to do propaganda, not journalism.
#
And I've had repeated experience with, you know, chiefs of agencies, organizations who
#
have been very fond of me.
#
But at the most crucial moment, they will try to mislead you.
#
So I have always been very clear headed about it.
#
And mind you, somewhere in my mind, I'm a Gandhian, I hate violence, I hate wars.
#
So it became a very contradictory life.
#
On the one side, I did not like this idea of nation states, you know, guarding the border,
#
the security dilemmas it create for each other.
#
On the other side, I was getting sucked more and more into the security apparatus of the
#
world, of the country and the region.
#
So I just went on, and I was in, then I, from Rediff, I went back to Times, Times of India,
#
then I came back to launch DNA with Ayas Mehmana and Pradeep Gu and all that.
#
It was while in DNA that I decided that enough of writing about defense and intelligence
#
alone, I need to understand India better.
#
And I decided to do a part-time masters, where I went on to study 12, 13 subjects from economics
#
to international trade and policy to negotiations, etc.
#
That is when I was called back by Times of India, Jojo asked me to come back to Times
#
I told him that I don't want to be a defense report.
#
I don't want to waste, I can, so I became editor special projects, doing only special
#
And Jojo gave me a free hand for some, a lot of, I mean, I had a lot of free hand in Times
#
So my investigations expanded, but at the same time, I continued to do stories on the
#
intelligence, defense, security establishment.
#
Now, one of the interesting strands that you've spoken about in your book is how the security
#
establishment tries to control the narrative.
#
And you've spoken about how, in fact, they try to co-opt you at different points in time.
#
They said they'll pay for your masters when you go abroad and so on.
#
And you, of course, refuse because hey, Sanic school values.
#
But my question here is that then when you get into that beat, obviously, the key commodity
#
which is important for you is information, and you get information from sources.
#
And yet, if many of your sources are insiders within the establishment, when they know that
#
you are not someone who will swallow the narrative necessarily, you know, and when it may not
#
be in their interest, therefore, to speak to you, how do you go about cultivating sources?
#
And given that so much is smoke and mirrors, you don't know whether a single thing that
#
is being told to you is necessarily true.
#
And it must be at some point in time, hard to corroborate things which are being told
#
So how did you navigate all of that?
#
Like were there times where you think you made a mistake, that you'd followed a certain
#
narrative or whatever, and it wasn't the case?
#
And so over a period of time, how do you build your, you know, your bullshit detection radar,
#
as it were, and this cultivation of sources, especially in a field like this, how does
#
Because, you know, being a cricket journalist for a while, and it's worse today, it was
#
But if you got too critical of cricketers, you would just lose access, or the BCCI would
#
just drop access if you messed with them.
#
Which was always fine for me, because I was more of a big picture kind of guy, I didn't
#
do so much reporting, and I didn't really care about the access.
#
But for those who actually have to write about what's going on inside the dressing room,
#
I can't imagine getting that information without access.
#
So take me through the life of a beat journalist in that regard, and so on and so forth.
#
Yeah, so I mean, that's where I want to go back to that, the run seeking behaviour we
#
said, there are great Indians, there are great people out there in every agency, every organisation.
#
They may not be the most famous.
#
But if you get to the right people, you don't need too many sources, I don't need a hundred
#
sources to scoop the stories.
#
I only need five of them, right?
#
They need to trust you.
#
And they should have the courage to tell you the truth and reach out to you, right?
#
So everything else is smoke and screen, right?
#
Everything else is bullshit.
#
So I would be spending a day with people who are trying to mislead me, but I won't take
#
So if something doesn't appear to my common sense, I usually drop it.
#
I've got my own criteria about accepting information, accessing documents, etc., which I've developed
#
over the years, which is not foolproof, but I think many of it works.
#
For example, if somebody were to give me a document and that person is not the primary
#
source handling the document.
#
I will not use it unless I can verify it.
#
So if you give me a file, and if you are handling that file, I will trust you.
#
My trust on you will be much higher.
#
But if you are not handling the file, you are giving somebody else's file to me.
#
I would not use it unless I can verify it.
#
But a lot of reporters run with file sensitivity, especially if it's interesting.
#
So in all agencies, there are great human beings out there, fantastic people, courageous people.
#
People are more courageous than all of us, at least people like you and me get recognition.
#
We sell books, people make movies on us, people listen to us.
#
But those are our real heroes, the ones in the organizations who quietly sit there.
#
And when they see something going wrong, they would reach out to people like me and tell
#
us that, listen, this is what's happening.
#
You need to write about it.
#
That loose network of whistleblowers in many ways who are around me are enabling me to
#
So I'm not a James Bond or anything.
#
These people provide information, that's one part.
#
The second part, which is Amit, is very, to me, very interesting is in the agencies.
#
There are various kinds of people.
#
Then the second kind of one, I told you, these courageous ones are the foundations for great
#
Second are the kind of people who are careerists, who will bribe journalists, whatever they
#
Many of them have a good quality, which is that once they know that you are not a bullshitter
#
and you should not be bullshitted around, they usually withdraw.
#
They will give you respect and space, but they may not entertain you too much.
#
But if you ask a question, they will not go quiet.
#
They know that this fellow has to be answered to, even if you don't tell the truth.
#
There is a third kind, which is the, you can't do anything to them.
#
They are in their fantasy world, they'll bribe, kick, whatever, you know.
#
So you just ignore them.
#
So there are people, I don't know, take names, who are, who have held very, very powerful
#
positions in this country, who have wanted to meet me, they refuse to meet them.
#
I said, no, I know he wants to meet me because he wants to plan some information and use
#
my byline to bring credibility to him.
#
I'm not going to, my byline is not on rent, it's not on sale for him.
#
So I've refused to meet some people.
#
I've, the consequences are there, you pay for it, but that's okay.
#
So between these three, I think my life has been very good.
#
I've been able to do enough stories to get attention from people like you.
#
You know, get attention from people like me.
#
And I hope people make films on your life, but nobody's going to make a film on mine.
#
So you know, in your book, you mentioned the carrot, which we've just spoken about, that
#
they tried to co-opt you and somebody spoke to you about a monthly retainer and to fund
#
your studies and all of that.
#
Which is not something that you mentioned in this book and which I assume must be there
#
because one of the things that struck me while reading this book was the way that you speak
#
of people who are still extremely prominent today in the police in Delhi, for example,
#
who's active in Gujarat under Mr. Modi, you know, and even people like Amit Shah, for
#
I mean, these are incredibly powerful people.
#
You have not put any filters out there.
#
You're basically just laying it out all out on the page for everyone to read, of course.
#
And for your last book, you were sued for enormous amounts of money, which you cannot
#
possibly possess with your sanic school values.
#
So tell me a little bit about how you then deal with the stick, you know, and I imagine
#
that when you're single is probably easier, but when you have a family to practical considerations
#
then come into mind, how does that kind of work?
#
I'm presuming you must have been threatened.
#
There must have been intimidation.
#
See that this is where the script goes off the track, because you ask a question like
#
this to the analyst and then he becomes a hero of the story.
#
Then he then he said, then he said boasting, you know, and I keep saying this to people
#
that, you know, if the reporter tries to be the hero of the story, you'll end up being
#
But you know something, you're not writing this story.
#
If I want to make you the hero, I'll make you the hero.
#
So you know, there are some grounds I'll tell you so other day, you know, last week morning
#
context, some reporter called me and was talking about surveillance, he was doing an article.
#
So he asked me, sir, how did you take protection?
#
So I passively told him an anecdote from my life, which then I can see so many people
#
were sharing, which was about, you know, like, so I've been I mean, ever since I've been
#
a reporter, I've been aware that for most part of my career, I've been trailed by some
#
So once I broke naval war room leak case in the end, I was being trailed by the naval
#
intelligence people, I think, for IB.
#
So you know, every day I would drive back in the evening, I had a routine, I'll come
#
in, park my car inside.
#
And there is a van which used to follow me, and they will be parked outside the apartment
#
And after two days, I told my wife, you know, we'll, so she's also journalists on a pre
#
You know, we are for this.
#
So it was easy to talk to her about this thing.
#
And my daughter Supriya was very small.
#
So we started switching off the light early, you know, apartment to the moment you switch
#
off the light, they're baboos, they go back, right?
#
There are no James Bond's in this country.
#
Let's be honest, if somebody pretends to be James Bond is bullshitting, there are people
#
who are doing professional work, good work, but no James Bond.
#
So they would go back and then I would come out and take my car and go and meet my source
#
So from that to being served with dozens of deformation notice and parliamentary privilege
#
notice and this and that, one goes through it.
#
And also nobody has come and beaten me up.
#
But very in a sweet way of threatening, very nicely you get threatened.
#
But to me, the most bizarre fact, most interesting aspect is when you talk loudly in the public
#
square like me, many of them actually either try to ignore you or try to co-opt you, meaning
#
the rewards available to you not to speak the next time are very positive.
#
Huge money, huge favors, etc.
#
That's what I would say.
#
But then there is also the larger reality, Amit, in India in a year, one and a half lakh
#
people die on our roads.
#
How many journalists die on the line of duty?
#
So I think being a journalist is far safer than being on the Indian road.
#
So we have to find solace really from such statistics, which may be absurd comparisons.
#
But seriously, Amit, if you are writing, if you are somebody who is committed to writing
#
about the here and now of the society and what's happening around, then between your
#
fingertips and the keyboard, you cannot have prejudices.
#
You cannot speculate what my words might mean and what it can bring to me.
#
You will have to write with the courage, you will have to write with the awareness that
#
you are going to be lonely.
#
Not very many people are going to defend you.
#
And the process itself can be the punishment, which could begin any moment.
#
And I write with that awareness, but I don't write with censorship as you must have noticed.
#
You mentioned that people threatened you in a nice way, so what would a nice way of threatening
#
Can you give me an example?
#
See, in a city like Delhi, everyone knows everyone around, right?
#
So when you are trying to do something on Mr. X, Mr. Y, who might be a lawyer or some
#
fixer, we'll meet you for a coffee and say that, you know, look, I heard you are doing
#
something on so-and-so.
#
Why do you want to do it?
#
You know, he's a rascal.
#
Do you want me to talk to him?
#
Why don't you meet him?
#
It's threat combined with the other thing.
#
The other is that some people actually do fixing at the other end.
#
When they know that I am working on something, this is something very strange I didn't realize,
#
they would do setting at the other end and come to you and say, look, I know that you
#
are doing something on so-and-so.
#
So we've got a budget, why don't we just split it, you know, why don't we just...
#
Then there are people who make money out of you and showing their proximity to you and
#
they will tell somebody, look, I'll ensure that he doesn't write against you.
#
So one day somebody got drunk and from his mouth it came out.
#
He told somebody, he boasted saying that, you know, Josie, you'll never write against
#
And he's bringing a ban and came and told me, I said, why?
#
Because he said, oh, he said you are being managed.
#
So it operates at multiple layers, multiple levels, because of which one thing I don't
#
do is I don't go out drinking with people.
#
I don't even go to a press club to drink.
#
If I don't want to drink, I drink at home, you know, I avoid those companies because
#
you will never know in a political city like Delhi who is on to what game.
#
So when I say sweet threats, it can be any of this.
#
So now I know that there's a managing Josie Joseph economy out there for scammers.
#
So prominent people in India will be getting emails, not from Nigerian fraudsters, but
#
from people saying, hey, we'll manage Josie, he's on your case, but we'll manage him.
#
You may not even know who they are.
#
Tell me also then about what are the kind of knowledge management systems that you have
#
gathered over the years in terms of just managing all the knowledge that you're taking in?
#
And especially as we get older and we're pretty much the same age, I realized that my memory
#
kind of is very unreliable and you know, something I might have read two weeks ago, I would completely
#
have forgotten even having read it.
#
And you know, for Feast of Vultures, you mentioned earlier in an interview elsewhere that you
#
had some 1500 documents or 15,000 documents, which you know, you got for that.
#
So what are the kind of knowledge management systems you used to use and what do you do
#
now in terms of putting your research together, putting your thoughts together?
#
How has that workflow evolved in a sense?
#
So I've always been fond of documents.
#
So I used to really store a lot of documents, but ever since digitization happened, you
#
will see hard disk lying around here and there, which I keep updating my computers.
#
I got Google, iCloud backups, etc.
#
So the standard this thing, I email myself a lot of things.
#
I do keep notebooks and for various things, because as you said, you know, like for example,
#
this notebook is about what I should do.
#
This notebook is about some stories I'm working on, there is a book in my bag, which is when
#
I take notes for meetings.
#
So not it's not perfect.
#
Sometimes I start my day making notes about what to be done today and start striking off.
#
Sometimes I don't do it.
#
That's one part of managing my thought process.
#
The second and which is I think what has really worked for me in terms of output is my time
#
management, where it also flows into what you said about knowledge management, which
#
is that in the morning, by 6.15, I'm up and I'm very disciplined in that sense.
#
Till about nine o'clock, I don't like anyone disturbing, I don't pick up my phone.
#
That's when I actually sit in front of my laptop, I'm reading or writing, either reading
#
something for the book I'm writing, or I'm typing my book, nothing else.
#
I might look at the Guardian, Indian Express and New York Times to let you know what's
#
I don't even look at Twitter or anything because that helps me to so every morning when I start
#
my day, I'm very sorted in my mind about what I'm looking for, what I'm reading.
#
And if I don't find something, I mail my colleagues, et cetera, whatever.
#
The other thing is I organize my backend because a lot of the stories that I'm pursuing are
#
on just in the session for years, because as soon as I get organized, put a folder name
#
But I have a fairly good sense of if I want to know about, let's say, something, let's
#
call it 2G Scam, I can pull it out quickly, I just need to research, I know the keywords.
#
So it's stored here and there, I got some backups, now it's all on cloud and all that.
#
That's how I manage, I don't, there is no other rocket science beyond it.
#
As far as books are concerned, one bad thing is that I find it, I struggle to recall names
#
of writers, but some books which are stuck with me, or which really impress me, those
#
I can recall, not to the page, but I would know where is that reference in which chapter.
#
That's a practice, you know, how we all, there are certain books that remains with you.
#
The third thing is that I also tend to speed read, because one doesn't have the time and
#
the luxury to read everything.
#
Like these days, I'm reading transfer of power papers, massive volumes, right?
#
But I speed read, I know I'm looking for so-and-so date and then I spend time there.
#
Each one of us develop our own strategies, I'm sure you have, I can see the way you have
#
kept book behind you and the way I have arranged book behind you are very different.
#
And it might also tell about the reading habits of ours.
#
Beyond that, I do take some security precautions.
#
So I don't just save my passwords anywhere and everywhere anymore, I just ensure some
#
Yeah, no, I've just moved into a new house.
#
So what you're seeing besides me is a bunch of unopened cartons with some books piled
#
But that's not how I keep my books.
#
I also have bookshelves like you do, but I also have a massive amount of mess normally,
#
but not the kind that you're looking at right now.
#
So you spoke about sort of books that have tended to stay with you.
#
My next question before we take a break and go on to then talk about your latest book
#
is what are the kind of sort of nonfiction books or writers that you've admired or learned
#
from given the kind of stuff that you are writing?
#
Like your books have been these investigative books of nonfiction, but also they feature
#
very fine storytelling, use of novelistic techniques.
#
So what are the kind of books that you admired when you read them and you took as models
#
and are they writers who influenced you where, you know, you looked at a particular writer
#
and you said, yeah, yeah, that's the kind of work I want to do.
#
See in the last 20, 30 years, as you know, nonfiction writing has really boomed and scaled
#
But even then, a book like this, it's called The Bear Trap, Afghanistan's Untold Story.
#
This was written by a former ISI colonel and Mark Atkin in the 80s.
#
I mean, this is courage.
#
They're detailing how ISI ran the Afghan operations.
#
So to me, this is also an inspirational book to what people like James Wright, Twin Towers,
#
So there are all of them.
#
But I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not the kind who has an inspirational figure or someone
#
I look up to, but yeah, when I was writing my first book, A Feast of Vultures, my prologue
#
is set in a village in Bihar and they're struggling to get road and hospital, etc.
#
Some people have noticed that I've tried to use some of the magical realism techniques
#
that Marquez popularized in that.
#
So I love the way, you know, when Marquez, Marquez will never tell you, I'm going to
#
You'll just tell the magic, right?
#
So little things like that, but you know, I grew up on Aldous Huxley and George Orwell
#
So you'll find a lot of my sentences are very pithy.
#
I don't know if you'll find it, some wicked sense of humor you'll find here and there.
#
So all that is in spread from those writers, because if you recall those, the Orwellian
#
English or the Huxley's writing and all that is very matter of fact to the world.
#
So because that shaped my thinking from very early days as a student, that I as a writer,
#
I have a responsibility towards you, which is you as a reader, which is to ensure that
#
you are not forced to take a dictionary in your hand when you read me.
#
The reading has to be an activity between you and me and my pages, not between you,
#
a dictionary or a Google and me.
#
And then the game is over.
#
So find the appropriate words, but not the difficult words is a big, big challenge for
#
me because I'm very insecure and unsure of my language skills, even today.
#
So I read, I sometimes write rewrite sentences, but yes, you will never find unusually long
#
You will not find unwieldy adjectives and adverbs in my writings.
#
So those have been shaped by, you know, I told everyone to sign your code.
#
I had this great English teacher called Premsi Nair, who came from Oxford, British educated.
#
People like him taught us, there was another teacher called N. Balush Nair.
#
These people, because I come from Malala mediums, you know, I learned English from them.
#
And one of the things that I learned was to use bare minimum words to tell something.
#
And I think that's the greatest way to connect with the reader.
#
So and it's a very deliberate thing I didn't do because there was a time if you read what
#
I used to write early in my 20s and I used to write with this flurry language, like a
#
lot of mullus and you will never figure out what they're writing, you know, I don't take
#
names, but even if I repeat some sentence, you will figure out who I'm talking about.
#
There are many of them like that.
#
So I have been very conscious.
#
If I can cut out an adjective, I would.
#
And you mentioned Orwell and obviously Orwell in terms of prose is my absolute hero.
#
But it's interesting that you mentioned Orwell because while reading your book, and by the
#
way, I can't believe that you have doubts about your own language, like you just said,
#
because it's such a bloody well written book.
#
But while reading your book, I was reminded of this quote that I keep sharing with my
#
writing class, which is, you know, Orwell's quote, good prose is like a windowpane, whereas
#
the whole point was that prose like a windowpane is a means to an end, you know, a windowpane
#
is supposed to show you what's on the other side and the prose should be equally invisible.
#
You don't notice it at all.
#
You just go with it where it is going.
#
The other point that also struck me just now is, you know, when you speak of coming from
#
a Malu medium school and then learning English and all.
#
And I wonder if in some ways that might be an advantage, because what that forces you
#
to do is to pay deeper attention in a more granular way to the intricacies of language,
#
to the words that you choose, to the way that you use grammar.
#
Like, you know, I remember one of my writing students for the online course I teach once
#
asked me about how, you know, her first language was in English and, you know, how does one
#
Should one write in English?
#
And I pointed her to this great interview of Jhumpa Lahiri in Tyler Cowen's podcast
#
Conversations with Tyler and Jhumpa, of course, learned Italian and has just written a book
#
And through what Jhumpa said in that interview, I discovered this incredible writer I recommend
#
to all my listeners called Agatha Kristof, I think Hungarian, but moved to France when
#
she was 21, learned French from scratch and wrote this incredible series of books called
#
The language there is incredible.
#
It's very spare, very sparse, very powerful, you know, and I'm reading her in translation,
#
of course, but you still get a sense of what it is.
#
So do you feel that that also made a difference perhaps in your early attempts to be more
#
florid than one would otherwise be because you might also be trying to convince yourself
#
that, hey, I can do this language and, you know, does that change later?
#
No, no, you're so right, you know, because I think when I started writing English, I
#
was writing to impress others and impress myself, not impress myself to give myself
#
confidence, but I was writing absolute trash.
#
But as I progressed and my own sense of language moved from being the curtain to the window
#
pane that you're talking about, right, I wanted to be that.
#
And that's where I dropped this entire.
#
So my own writing has changed.
#
And in fact, my agent, Kanishka, that they was telling me that probably the silent who
#
is a far faster paced, pithy writing than even Feast of Vultures.
#
Even Ajitha, my editor, was telling me that.
#
It could well be true because in the first book, I'm also making this entire effort to
#
explain everything to the audience, because I'm also trying to explain to myself, you
#
When a writer is writing something, he's writing it for the reader and also for himself.
#
But with the new book, I am more confident.
#
I know my audience because I give them more respect and I give myself more respect.
#
So I think language keeps changing.
#
My writing in the next book might be something else.
#
But probably, as you said, I was I grew up in Malayalam and then I shifted to English.
#
And now I think I even think in English.
#
Now I not struggle, I find it very difficult to communicate complex ideas in Malayalam
#
Whereas I'm very comfortable talking Malayalam with my parents, my siblings, everybody.
#
But even when I think in English and write in English, I think at somewhere in the back
#
of your mind, your sense of language is so rooted in your native sensibilities.
#
I'll tell you, for example, something that M.S.
#
Madhavan recently pointed out, which struck me very big time, was that rain is so much
#
part of the Malayali life, that rain doesn't have too many adjectives in Malayalam.
#
There's only one or two words for Malayalam, Malayalam, you know, there are very few words
#
about rain because it's so part of us.
#
So if you look at my book, I think if you break down the book, my book, it may be just
#
a few thousand words, meaning I'm repeating a few thousand words, nothing more.
#
I'm not, I will not introduce an adjective that I know there.
#
I mean, it's a very, very interesting conversation.
#
I'm not, I'm not such a literary accomplished guy, but I think language for me is the means
#
And I'm telling you a story or many stories because I have an argument to make.
#
So it goes to that way.
#
And I have an argument to make because it's an argument that I think everyone around me
#
should or my readers should know the way I know.
#
So he's able to look at the democracy, the society with the same lens and comfort that
#
So when, when a leader makes a promise for a certain statement, I can see through what
#
Prem said that I'm a very typical beat reporter.
#
So when in beat reporting, we say that, have you cracked the beat or not?
#
Cracked meaning then you are so comfortable, you can predict what's going to happen in
#
So I can tell you in military, if I see something, I can tell you, okay, there's a war going
#
That much confidence I have seeing elements around.
#
So I think it's about cracking that apart to helping the reader crack the beat called
#
India or beat called democracy.
#
So a final question before we go in for the break and then we come back to discuss a book.
#
And this is again from an interesting anecdote that in fact, Prem shared in a workshop that
#
he did for our writing class, which is by the way on YouTube and I'll share the link
#
in the show notes where Prem pointed to this interview of a writer, I forget if he mentioned
#
the name, but if he did, I don't remember it.
#
But this interview of a writer who was asked about his writing process and he said, first
#
I go into a room and I sit down, you know, with my computer or typewriter or whatever,
#
and then I shut the door.
#
But I'm not alone because you know, I can sense behind me all the people who have expectations
#
of me or who are looking over my shoulder in different ways or who I care about and
#
So I just sit there quietly till all of them leave.
#
So whoever was asking the question then asked him, so, so that's when you begin writing.
#
And he said, no, that's not when I begin writing either, because there is still one person
#
in the room and that's me.
#
And I wait till I leave and then I let the story tell itself.
#
So and I was very struck by this and is this something that you have thought about in your
#
Because earlier you spoke about how a reporter should never be the hero of his story.
#
Also in terms of language in our youth, we all write that kind of florid style, right?
#
When we're trying to be impressive and which is obviously putting ourselves front and center
#
and saying, look at me, how well I write.
#
But then eventually you learn to kind of take that out and just do justice to the story
#
and to let it speak for itself.
#
So tell me about your thoughts on this.
#
So I said, I write in the morning, but you know, like after nine, I go for my walk when
#
I'm walking, I'm usually thinking about what should come next.
#
And that process goes on through the day while I'm driving.
#
And very often when I'm sitting in meetings with people, they know they do notice that
#
I get bored very quickly and my attention goes away.
#
One of the reasons is that I'm still thinking, processing, how should I now structure the
#
So that is something which constantly happens with me.
#
And people have to slap me out, even at home also.
#
Sometimes my wife or daughter do get surprised that I'm sitting in front of TV and just watching.
#
It's not that I'm lost in the TV.
#
I'm thinking about the sentence, how should I introduce this character?
#
How should I come in, I as a, you know, meaning the little David, how should he come into
#
the story about explaining how often should I go?
#
So that process is, to me, it's 24 hours.
#
It's almost anxiety inducing to me.
#
So I get very anxious about, you know, how much should I come in?
#
So last, when I wrote my first book, my editors pushed me to come in more into the book because
#
I was skipping away, like a traditional reporter.
#
So when I get into the room in the morning with a cup of tea and sit in front of my laptop,
#
then my previous 24 hours of processing that has happened just flows.
#
And there is an end to it.
#
Because sometimes I have only thought about a paragraph.
#
So this morning I was writing something about formation of Indian democracy.
#
And I've been writing about that one incident over the last four weeks.
#
And I've been getting so irritated with myself, but I am unable to pull myself away from reading
#
cancer of power papers regarding those days.
#
But because it's lingering on and you know that there's a great scene out there.
#
How do you now write it?
#
So when I sit in front of the computer in the morning, I am not bothered about anybody.
#
I am just writing what I've been processing for the last previous 24 hours.
#
But there is one more thing which makes my writing, which made it possible for me to
#
write two books in the last five years.
#
One is that I think I believe that I'm a multitasker.
#
I can do multiple things.
#
And a lot of people find it overwhelming, including my family and friends, many friends.
#
My mind keeps racing about ideas and things and people.
#
So while I'm writing the book, I was also doing a startup.
#
While I was writing this book and doing the startup, I was also helping people structure
#
some film stories or documentary structures.
#
While I was doing all these things, I was also fundraising.
#
While I was doing all this, I'm also mentoring reporters on university resources.
#
I'm genuinely a multitasker and maybe I become a machine in that sense.
#
That's very impressive because not only am I not a multitasker myself, I sometimes find
#
it hard even to be a single tasker and just to kind of focus on one thing.
#
And one of the kind of problems that I have also had is self-absorption, where like you
#
pointed out, you're sitting in front of the TV and your mind is somewhere else.
#
So you're sitting with someone, but you're not in the moment.
#
Your mind is somewhere else doing something, which is something obviously one feels guilty
#
about if you're with loved ones, because you know, then that becomes a problem.
#
Are you treating them as a means to an end?
#
Are you not there in the moment there for them?
#
Your mind is somewhere else.
#
That's a complicated sort of trade off.
#
Is that something you've thought about?
#
You know, it's family is very close, my wife, daughter, my parents, siblings, all of them.
#
But there are weeks and months when I have to make an effort to make the phone call,
#
meaning the old parents are back in village and we talk almost every other day.
#
But there are weeks when I have to force myself to call them.
#
Not that I don't love them any less, not that there is any fiction.
#
But what you said, you know, you're so caught up in your mind is racing on something that
#
even a phone call to your loved ones is a distraction.
#
So there are days when I come into my houses, go to the bathroom, take bath, come back,
#
and they're just wondering what is he up to, you know.
#
But then I think all of us do have our own peculiarities that get accentuated as we grow
#
And then we get more irritated and irritating.
#
So I am sure I'm one of them.
#
But yeah, you can't help it, you know, because I used to think that this is a boarding school
#
problem because you are emotionally plugged away from your family at the age of 11, 12.
#
And that may be the gap.
#
But yeah, what you're saying, I understand.
#
So I do have to make an effort very often.
#
You know, I had to tell myself that call your wife, you know, don't call Priya, you know,
#
like don't keep driving for an hour without calling her, you know.
#
Yeah, I mean, it's an effort.
#
It's an effort sometimes.
#
Yeah, and definitely not a boarding school problem because I didn't go to one.
#
So anyway, we'll take a quick commercial break here.
#
And when we come back, we'll talk about your book, which I can't wait to do what a book
#
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Welcome back to the scene and the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Josie Joseph about his wonderful book, The Silent Coup, a history of India's
#
You know, you structured the book really interestingly in terms of storytelling where you humanize
#
it with this character you meet early in the story in your first section in Bombay.
#
But I'll take more of an approach of coming at the issue from root causes, you know, before
#
we even start talking about our security establishment.
#
I found three particular strands in your book, very fascinating.
#
And one of them is the 1857 mutiny and the 1861 Indian Police Act that it leads to and
#
why we still kind of feel the after effects of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about that because not many people think that our current problems
#
go that far back, but of course they do.
#
So tell me a bit more about why the mutiny was so formative in having the kind of police
#
Post mutiny, as you know, the Empire decides to take complete control.
#
And one of the big steps they do is to bring in this Police Act and give the framework
#
for a police force to run the country on behalf of the Empire and to control the locals, the
#
revolting locals and put them in their place.
#
And that Police Act has remained the framework for most police acts after that, even those
#
that have been passed after independence.
#
And that remains the overarching umbrella that governs Indian police forces even today.
#
For the last two, two and a half decades, and mind you, starting from the post-independence
#
period there have been administrative reforms commissions, there have been police commissions
#
and others who have recommended reforms to the Police Act, they have all been scuttled.
#
And two decades ago, Prakash Singh and others, former IPS officer landed in Supreme Court
#
demanding police reforms, and the Supreme Court has passed landmark judgments, but they
#
I don't know if it seems to have worked.
#
In nutshell, the police reforms is basically to depoliticise the police, which involves
#
simple steps like at TANA level, there will be, or district level also, there will be
#
a committee of nominated citizens, prominent personalities, ensured to be, it's apolitical
#
or with political representatives from all sides, to look at the performance of the TANA,
#
which is what a democracy should let do, look at their investigations or their operations,
#
at the state level to give the police chief a fixed tenure so that he knows that whatever
#
he does, he can't be shaken for two years by the political masters, which means he's
#
not trying to please the masters.
#
There are all these recommendations that are out there, not one Indian state has fully
#
implemented it, because our politicians don't like the police to be apolitical.
#
Because the moment they lose control of the police, their thuggery, their criminal political
#
bent of mind can't then exist, many of them could land up in jail.
#
So they have been, it is a political class with the active support of some part of bureaucracy
#
and a lot of silence by judiciary that has helped the remnants of the first war of independence
#
and the Police Act of 1861 to remain today, which in very simple one sentence, the police
#
is not of the people, police is the agent of the state and the state is empire or the
#
politician and the people are potential enemies.
#
Into that mix, add the deadly poison called corruption.
#
So the politician on top is corrupt or his party is corrupt because he needs a lot of
#
Now he uses this police force and other arms of the state to collect money at various levels.
#
So he helps legitimize daily corruption.
#
So the police constable on ground who is asking for a bribe knows that he will be protected
#
by some politician at some level because he is also helping that politician make money
#
somewhere else, collect some hafta somewhere.
#
Between these two, we have a deadly nuclear bomb attack on the masses.
#
And you've detailed in your book about how this group of people went to the Supreme Court
#
in 1996, ex IPS officers said, let's get this change 2006, the Supreme Court rules that,
#
hey, this is what the states need to do and no one's done it to date.
#
And why would they, I mean, why would any class of politicians give up so much power?
#
What is also kind of interesting and we almost take this for granted, but I think it needs
#
to be pointed out how much structurally the police here is really serving the political
#
class and not so much the people and it's supposed to serve the people.
#
And this notion of the police was something we carried over from colonial times.
#
Like I remember during the constituent assembly debates, there was one legislator who complained
#
about how the constitution is being written from the point of view of a policeman, which
#
is, and we kept most of the Indian penal code, the IPC, which was intended to kind of subjugate
#
And I think those words would still hold this way today.
#
And an interesting thing that not many people realize, we complain about, for example, the
#
sedition law, which, why do we need that after the British left?
#
Well, the Supreme Court struck it down in 1950 and Nehru brought it back with the First
#
Amendment in a process that's detailed in Tripur Dhaman Singh's excellent 16 Stormy
#
Days, which I had an episode with Tripur Dhaman also, which are linked from the show notes.
#
So those days, the sedition, the limits of freedom of expression was triggered by the
#
Today it is being triggered by the fear of the Muslim terrorists or the Islamic terror
#
conspiracies, right, and Durban Naxals.
#
So the enemies keep changing, enemy of the state, the so-called enemies keep changing,
#
but the tools against them remain the same.
#
The tools remain the same.
#
The second factor out of the three, which I want to talk about, which struck me as contributing
#
to the security establishment being the way it is here, is that interesting phase post
#
independence where you have the security apparatus, which is taken over from the colonial
#
But where it's different from other countries freed from colonialism is that our political
#
rulers in their wisdom realized that the military was a danger, that there were coups happening
#
all over the place in other newly independent countries.
#
We've seen on Pakistan how big a hand the military plays.
#
So therefore, that kind of decision was made that keep the military under control.
#
And therefore, the parts of the security establishment, and I'll ask you to go into detail soon, but
#
before that, just this kind of general phase, the parts of the security establishment which
#
are dominant are, you know, the police and all the intelligence agencies we have and
#
all of those and not the military per se.
#
And there, of course, it's a vicious circle.
#
But tell me a little bit about how important this decision was, and could there have been
#
a little more foresight in seeing the way the things played out with the rest of the
#
security establishment, as you detailed in your book, or is it not fair to expect that
#
of the people back in the day, I mean, how would they know that it would turn out like
#
I think, see, the generation of Nehru, Ambedkar, Patel, Assad, that generation truly believed
#
in parliamentary democracy, but they were creating the world's largest democracy.
#
There were a million problems to deal with.
#
And as old democracies, it is a process, it was a process.
#
So we can't blame them for not doing it.
#
They did some of the cornerstone moves like, you know, I don't know if you go to UPSC
#
office, you will see a photograph, Nehru is visiting UPSC to call on the UPSC chairman.
#
That's the respect that Nehru, the prime minister gave UPSC, which is recruiting civil servants.
#
Like chief election commissioner is autonomy, discussions of which begins very early.
#
I'm saying that the democratic state did bring in like, for example, the way it structured
#
the Ministry of Defence, Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard, they became the adjunct
#
They were not inside the ministry.
#
Ministry was fully civilian.
#
And even today, I don't know if you know this, the defence secretary has to approve the budget
#
of the military intelligence.
#
So the controls are very strong, sometimes absurd also.
#
Sometimes they go overboard with the baboos trying to decide everything that should be
#
done in Siachenor, you know, but controls are very strong.
#
While the other part of the non-military security establishment, which largely came over from
#
the British era, especially the intelligence bureau and later R&DW, also, I think, to a
#
great extent Indira Gandhi's autocratic ways or whatever you want to call it, they did
#
not put them under proper parliamentary accountability.
#
One of the arguments given by many of the intelligence operatives even today is that,
#
oh, no, no, our politicians are correct, we can't trust them.
#
Maybe they are correct, but ultimately they are people's representatives.
#
But there are countries where even if the intelligence agencies are not under parliamentary
#
audit, there are some kind of external audit, checks and balances.
#
For example, the entire industry of sources.
#
So all agencies are dependent upon information, and information comes from sources or technical
#
intelligence, and this source industry is massive, much, much bigger than any industry
#
But if a CIA or MI6, if they get information from a source, X, and that source X is misleading,
#
they have systems in place to audit who is X and what information they gave, was it misleading,
#
But in India, you don't have any verifiable auditing mechanisms.
#
So the fake information industry, which in turn helped these agencies or arms of them
#
to create fake narratives, etc., got strengthened over the years.
#
And as the parliamentary accountability deteriorated, and parliamentary debates deteriorated, and
#
parliament as an institution deteriorated, which right under Mr. Narendra Modi is in
#
And I think the government is almost inimical towards parliament today.
#
Those accountabilities have been weakening, and on the parallelly, the sinister arms,
#
the unknown arms of these agencies were strengthening.
#
Because their strength is not just from their lack of accountability, their strength is
#
also from the fact that they are the tools for the political masters to create their
#
narratives, to intimidate their rivals, to silence the media, to silence critics.
#
So they draw power from two sides, one, that they naturally are not accountable at any
#
Second, they are the tools of the political executive for creating the narratives and
#
terrorizing the masses.
#
So we can't say that Nehru or Patel or Assad, they were not foresighted.
#
It is that the state formation is a long process.
#
Democracies take decades to mature, and democracies collapse in decades.
#
And we are standing at a point where you and me today sitting here, I don't know how much
#
of optimism we share about democracy's future in India.
#
I'm hopeful, but I don't see any reason to be optimistic that we would be a mature liberal
#
democracy anytime soon.
#
And for that, the reason is that the process of democratization of India, it doesn't happen
#
In India, it has always, you know, there have been governments during which it has really
#
For example, the first Manmohan Singh government, the way Right to Information, Right to Education,
#
etc. came in, it was quite impressive and revolutionary.
#
But by the second Manmohan Singh government, you have corruption and all the mismanagement.
#
So it has always been in epsom flows.
#
But the fact is that we gave up that process somewhere, strategic process of bringing agencies
#
accountable to minimize sinister sides to a democracy, to polish the edges of the rough
#
edges of democratic institutions.
#
And that's where our problems are stuck.
#
It is not impossible to reform and rewind, it's not impossible to move forward.
#
But today, we are in a very vicious cycle where a generation of politicians, both in
#
power and outside, have mostly been beneficiaries and have actively used these arms of the
#
security forces to create their images and narrative and even capture power.
#
To give you my view on, you know, you just said, I wonder how we feel about liberal democracy.
#
I'm pessimistic in the short term, pessimistic in the medium term.
#
I'm optimistic in the long term, but in the long term, we are all dead, as Keen said.
#
And I'm also reminded by what you're saying, and I kind of agree with you that this kind
#
of stuff would have been impossible to foresee at the founding of the nation.
#
And I had an episode with the historian Gyan Prakash, who's written this very fine book
#
And his central argument there is that, you know, everything that Indira Gandhi did was
#
And why was it constitutional in the first place?
#
Why was it legit to do it?
#
And in fact, which has the same answer as to why did we design the state for a policeman?
#
And what Gyan's thesis was that, look, when the framers of our constitution were sitting
#
in a room in Delhi, framing the constitution, the country was falling apart.
#
There was violence all over.
#
No one knew if the center would hold.
#
So from their point of view, it is rational to follow the same impulse of the colonialists,
#
make sure it all stays together and doesn't kind of fragment and all of that.
#
My third question, which is not something that you've spoken about in the book explicitly
#
per se, but that strikes me as a big contributing factor to as one of the manifestations of
#
the decay in the security establishment, not a core part of it per se, but a manifestation,
#
a new enemy and also an old enemy, is this whole Hindu-Muslim thing.
#
More and more as I have gone through life, I realized that I kind of grew up in this
#
kind of clustered elite existence where one assumed that people were generally secular
#
and that religion generally didn't matter.
#
And then over a period of time, you sort of realize that it does.
#
You know, one thesis I have long held is that our constitution doesn't reflect who we are
#
This is almost again a cliche on the show because I keep chatting about this with especially
#
constitutional experts.
#
But the point there is that, look, our constitution is not as liberal as you and I would perhaps
#
like it to be, but it is still more liberal than society, which leads us to the question
#
of, was it merely a topsoil, as Ambedkar so eloquently said?
#
And therefore, did we make a mistake in assuming that, you know, we could make the country
#
liberal in a top-down kind of way, which itself seems a little illiberal?
#
And did we fail at those who are liberal among us?
#
Though many people interpret the word liberal differently, but on this, I think they would
#
Did we fail among us in some way to make India more liberal?
#
Because it now seems that, you know, politics has finally caught up with society, that we
#
were like this all along.
#
I did an episode with Akshay Mukul also on his great book in the Geeta Press.
#
And one of the things that I learned while reading that book and looking at his work
#
is that this has been a country where these divisions are much deeper than we realize
#
and much more widespread.
#
And this is represented, for example, in some of the stats that you've given in your book.
#
Like early on, you speak about the under-representation of Muslims where, you know, you speak about
#
– and I'll quote you – less than 1% of Muslims made up the ranks of the Maharashtra
#
State Police, far below India's embarrassingly low 4% Muslim representation in the IPS.
#
The story was not very different in other states, in Uttar Pradesh, 2.3%, little over
#
3% head constables, just over 4% constables.
#
And also, just over 3% of the paramilitary force was Muslim, only 3% of the IES was Muslim,
#
And at one level, one could say that it's because Muslims tend to be from a lower socioeconomic
#
class, so less opportunities and all of that.
#
But that can't possibly explain this massive disparity.
#
The other thing that is very clear in your book, time and again, is that constantly the
#
security establishment is building narratives of Islamic terror where none exist, creating
#
fake news, implicating innocent people, and so on and so forth.
#
So is this a tendency that you have noticed that goes beyond all of this?
#
Okay, we understand that the security establishment is a tool of the political class and they
#
have their own aims and all of that.
#
But is there also this overarching anti-Muslimness which has been expressing itself in our governance
#
in these ways long before our politics got there?
#
Yeah, there are a few things to consider together.
#
One is that for the last three decades, what has been most of our security establishment
#
Fighting in Kashmir or operating there.
#
While it may be militancy for Kashmir's freedom, whatever, it's mostly an Islamic militancy.
#
That has really got into the nerves and DNA of our organizations.
#
That has created such anti-Islamic bias that it's going to take a long time to wipe of
#
Second, because agencies are not accountable, nobody's bothered to inspect these biases.
#
Third is that if your bias and the resultant action do not attract any punishment or any
#
other pushback, you'll keep it in, because that's the safest thing to do.
#
That's what most of the agency people have been doing.
#
And because of all this, our agencies have always been very hostile towards Muslims.
#
I should use the word hostile because R&DW at the senior level doesn't appoint a single
#
And IB has Muslims, but there have been so many whispers about the kind of anti-Muslim
#
And the kind of fake information IB and other agencies actively spread in the last decade,
#
when I say last decade, the first decade of this century, when two terror groups were
#
One was Indian Mujahideen, the other was a Hindu terror group.
#
And both were bombing us, especially IB and police.
#
They were spreading fake narratives and creating fake terrorists.
#
So I've had this couple of personally very bizarre experiences.
#
So Malega, first bomb blast happened.
#
My own sources in the agencies told me, look, there have been Hindutva terrorists, you know,
#
violence forces in that area.
#
So I wrote an analysis.
#
Next day I am summoned, I'm called in by one of the senior most officers in IB who lectures
#
me about how two different Muslim groups are fighting in Malega.
#
And one is, you know, Wahhabis.
#
I think Sunnis versus Deobandis.
#
So they're actively creating a narrative, which made me much later suspicious.
#
If are they, were they trying to cover up the fact that there is a Hindutva group existing?
#
Because later on I've heard very serious senior people saying that there may have been some
#
kind of a state involvement in creating the terrorist group.
#
And if you look at Colonel Pirovich's testimonies, et cetera, there are the Hinds out there.
#
So what I'm saying is that the anti-Muslim bias that really peaked because of Kashmir
#
within the ranks have been further strengthened by actions within the organizations of not
#
actively recruiting enough Muslims, not bringing Muslims leadership positions, not that there
#
were not Muslims available, et cetera.
#
And third, the lack of accountability.
#
So those intelligence operatives, those policemen who created the fake narratives or created
#
fake terrorists, all of them have gotten away without any punishment.
#
Some of your most celebrated IPS officers have been crass anti-Muslim communal people
#
And that is what I captured in my book, I have tried to capture in my book.
#
Many of our police officers and policemen who have been honored by the president and
#
the states year after year are mere brutal daylight murderers.
#
So there is no accountability.
#
They are not held accountable.
#
You don't see very many policemen, there are some exceptions in Manipur, for example,
#
50 policemen are on trial for state sponsored killings, but I don't know what's happening
#
Other than that, look at Punjab, thousands disappeared.
#
I mean, you come in KPS, GIL or others, whatever justifications you can give.
#
But in a democracy, even in the thickest fog of war, the police or the agencies are supposed
#
to be upholding the constitution of the country, which guarantees individual liberty to everyone,
#
including every Sardarji, every Punjabi in Punjab, every Manipuri, every Kashmiri.
#
So somewhere we got completely messed up.
#
And because, see, without accountability, no systems improve.
#
So you know, you're speaking of emergency, how did Indira Gandhi and Kothri manage to
#
run this country for one and a half, two years under emergency is because they had this non-security,
#
non-military arm of the security establishment, especially the police, income tax, et cetera,
#
And after that, what happened, Jake Mohan, who was in Delhi, leading many of the demolitions
#
or actions of Delhi, what happened to him?
#
He went on to become a cabinet minister and twice the governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
#
So is the story of almost every other bureaucrat who played the gunda role for the Indira Gandhi
#
What happened to policemen who did ridiculous things in Gujarat under Narendra Modi?
#
They're all now in powerful positions or have been given police medals and honours, right?
#
So we have a pattern which encourage anti-Muslim biases and hostility towards minorities.
#
And that is only going up by the day because ever since our new government has come into
#
power, they have been, I mean, it's an embarrassing thing for you to hear a prime minister saying
#
that I can identify the protesters by their clothes.
#
I mean, forget the communal tone of it.
#
Look at the, what is the word, illiteracy of that language, you know, look at, look at,
#
look at the stupidity of that language.
#
So we have, we are in a crisis, a crisis where anti-Muslim biases, both good politics and
#
good for the rascals in the police ranks or indolence ranks.
#
It's almost like a criminal collusion.
#
Yeah, that's what it's come down to.
#
Let's talk now about, you know, I want to go through each region one at a time.
#
The way you've laid it out in your book is beautiful and we'll probably start with Kashmir.
#
I want to talk about Punjab, about Bombay, all of these.
#
But first, I'd like you to define for my listeners what you mean by the security establishment,
#
because one of the staggering sort of numbers in your book was when you point out that there
#
are about four million members in the non-military security establishment distributed across
#
the country and from, you know, state police to tax collectors and so on.
#
We don't mean the military by the non-military security establishment.
#
What exactly does it mean and how widespread is it?
#
So non-military means you have the paramilitary forces, which increasingly play a lot of role
#
in domestic politics, militants, etc.
#
You have the state police forces who are governed by the legacy of the 1861 Police Act.
#
You have a country-wide network of income tax enforcement directorate.
#
You have the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence.
#
You have the Central Bureau of Investigation.
#
All of them have state nationwide presence.
#
All of them are empowered with bundles of laws which are very, very efficient and can
#
be easily misused if there is no accountability.
#
And all of these forces, so unless the state police force is under an opposition party,
#
otherwise it's available to the center or the party in power.
#
Even in states where the opposition is ruling, even that opposition, the formula of misuse
#
So you can't say that, you know, in Mamada Banerjee's West Bengal police is very good,
#
no, because there also political power draws significantly from the misuse or the leverage
#
So these 4 million approximate number that I have calculated, 40 lakh people are spread
#
across the country, they are empowered by various laws and they are almost faceless
#
and whatever they do, very little of accountability and they are assured that they just need to
#
obey the political masters of the day, that in fact their careers will boom, I mean, it
#
will all, it will flourish, they'll go to great heights in careers.
#
That is the non-military and why am I not stressing too much on the IAS is because yes,
#
IAS also is part of the political manipulation, but my focus was more on the security aspects
#
But add to it now the civil service, IAS, a large number of the IAS officers are today
#
available to the political establishment.
#
The good ones have gone quiet or left the service.
#
So we have a monster out there, most of it is not even visible to us.
#
You can't put a shape to it and you wouldn't know that in your neighborhood sits an income
#
tax office or enforcement directorate.
#
So it's almost invisible and they're present across the country and abroad and they've
#
got enormous clout, power and laws.
#
And that's the non-security establishment, what I call the non-military arm of the security
#
establishment, if I may call it.
#
And all of them are used by politicians, by whoever is in power at that moment as a tools
#
because that's just the structure of the whole thing.
#
And you mentioned civil service, which brought to my mind a thought I probably shouldn't
#
share, but I'll share it anyway, that should an impolite IAS officer be considered part
#
And I had to get my one dad joke out of the way at this part of the episode.
#
Let's talk about Kashmir now and Kashmir seems to me an apt place to start because it's perhaps
#
the starkest illustration of how the security establishment can grow and how it can create
#
a kind of a vicious circle.
#
Now it's interesting you point out how you could see the security establishment in action
#
as early as 1951, where you write about Sheikh Abdullah in the elections in that year, where
#
you say, quote, Sheikh Abdullah was a seasoned politician quoted by two countries and stood
#
astride the fault lines of nation-making in South Asia.
#
In October 51, when elections in the Kashmir Constituent Assembly were held, he ensured
#
that the nomination papers of several leaders of Praja Parishad, a party of Jammu Hindus
#
that was opposed to him, were rejected on mere technicalities.
#
Abdullah went on to jail over 10,000 people on political charges.
#
And in many instances, his detractors were expelled to Pakistan.
#
In short, he manipulated the state machinery to meet his own political ambitions.
#
Thinking back, it's not surprising that JNK, which has witnessed some of the worst tragedies
#
of state machinations, should have been one of the first Indian states where the political
#
and permanent executive manipulated the security apparatus.
#
Now this is, of course, pretty standard.
#
But where we see the underpinnings of the crisis that is sort of still going on is when
#
you talk about the 60s and what's happening there, and how what you so eloquently call
#
the business of militancy begins to sort of take shape.
#
And tell me a little bit more about this period in the 1960s and the sort of vicious circle
#
that it leads to, where you have this sort of security apparatus whose incentives are
#
tailored towards continuing to have an enemy to fight against, and therefore whose brutalities
#
against this imagined and supposed, sometimes imagined and supposed enemies, actually create
#
more disaffected people.
#
And then it just becomes a spiral.
#
And we've seen that spiral play out, you know, the 90s onwards.
#
But you know, until I read your book, I hadn't realized the extent to which it took solid
#
shape in the 60s itself.
#
So tell me a bit about that.
#
So you know, Kashmir always had these elements there who either wanted to be part of Pakistan
#
or wanted to be independent, right?
#
And if you recall during the independence in the Poonch side, there have been huge rebellions,
#
So in Kashmir Valley, the militancy actually starts in the 1960s.
#
It started then with very educated youngsters taking up arms in a very limited way.
#
Many of them were actually wanting to support the 1965 Pakistan invaders.
#
And then they went on to carry on with the militancy and there were bank robberies, etc.
#
And many of them are very educated.
#
The fact is that these were these, you know, uneducated college graduates, etc., from well
#
to do families, engineers, doctors, etc.
#
And these pioneers of militancy were definitely anti-India.
#
They were very clear about the fact that Kashmir should be independent or with Pakistan.
#
When the militancy started, these militants started doing bank robberies or attacks, police
#
And the more brutal the police, the more rewards the police got from the state, meaning the
#
state actively started encouraging brutal policing.
#
And thus began to come up one of the most important landmarks of Kashmir which are interrogation
#
They started creating interrogation centers into which these youngsters were holed up
#
and they were tortured and forced to confess, whatever.
#
You can argue about the goodness or badness of waterboarding and torture, but I think
#
in a democracy it has no place.
#
Now that phenomenon of militancy and the counter-policing, unaccounted policing, it began to pick pace,
#
but did not really take off.
#
Because by the 1970s, as you know, the Sheikh Indira Accord came into being and Kashmir
#
actually witnessed a large period of peaceful democratic existence.
#
And if India had, Indian leadership had made the efforts in the 80s, Kashmir would have
#
been a peaceful paradise, but the political machinations that both center Congress and
#
the local politicians did, especially Farooq Abdullah and Rajiv Gandhi did in 1987, triggered
#
And it triggered the new militancy which till date continues to consume Kashmir, consume
#
India's democratic credentials, consume thousands of lives of local ordinary people there and
#
thousands of Indian security forces.
#
And even then, 1987, so first the political manipulation happens and then as the militancy
#
picks up, instead of finding political solutions to the problem, India securitized the entire
#
Kashmir issue and sent more forces in, more interrogation centers came up, more agencies
#
came in, more cruelties came in.
#
And while it is all happening, you have the monster of ISI and Pakistan on the other side.
#
On the other side, and that's the foolishness of the Indian myopic political leadership
#
of the day, that they couldn't realize the fact that Pakistan had by then become a state
#
where one was it was a state owned by the military, second, the military's legitimacy
#
largely came from and Pakistan's legitimacy largely came from the struggle and fight for
#
And in Afghanistan, you had the CIA, ISI sponsored Mujahidin's and by the end of the 80s, when
#
the Soviet Union collapses, withdraws from there, all of them, all the resources is diverted
#
And we have till date, we might say anything, Indian state till date doesn't have neither
#
the control over Kashmir narrative, nor found a formula to deal with it.
#
We have done the same things that the other side has been doing.
#
We can't take any much, much high moral grounds than anyone else.
#
And that's a frightening part for a democracy, to be playing as dirty as the militants or
#
an ISI sponsored state is embarrassing.
#
So Kashmir in many ways captures the decay that I'm talking about in the heart of Indian
#
democracy, which is that we let our agencies go to rot in Kashmir.
#
And thousands of floors are being pumped into that state every year in the name of security.
#
And we don't seem to find any solution, we try various tactics, nothing seems to be working
#
and the latest efforts by the Modi government to withdraw Article 370 and bifurcate the
#
state doesn't seem to have done anything much.
#
It again looks to me that it will burst out any day.
#
But Kashmir, what it did was the Indian response in Kashmir to the militants in the 60s and
#
later in the 80s and 90s is to contaminate the Indian democratic project while letting
#
massive human rights violations and sacrifices by Indian security agencies, both.
#
So it's a very tragic tale of what could have been the crown on India's head turning into
#
an embarrassment and a shame.
#
You mentioned interrogation centers and one of the striking details I was struck by in
#
your book was that one of them was called Papa 2, which is such a benign name.
#
I remember back in my days as a professional poker player, when I would win a big pot,
#
I would often say come to Papa as I would bring the chips towards me.
#
So if I ever make a comeback, I can say come to Papa 2, which now has multiple shades of
#
And it's also interesting that you point out how many of the people in that early swell
#
in the 1960s were highly educated, which reminds me of exactly the same thing what people talk
#
about early naxalism, that the best minds of the generation were kind of drawn to it,
#
which I find so tragic.
#
I mean, it says a lot about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, about misplaced idealism,
#
taking up arms against the state and all that.
#
It never kind of works.
#
There's an interesting sort of para I want to read out from your book, which refers to
#
the 60s, but which actually seems resonant far beyond that as well.
#
So I'll just read it out where you talk about some of these torture chambers or interrogation
#
And you write quote, behind the soundproof walls of these buildings, a new narrative
#
was created for Kashmir.
#
Within these confines of security forces tortured both militants and ordinary protesters.
#
The torture in turn fed the anger and fury of the local narratives against India, regardless
#
of the explanation supplied by security agencies, the secret compounds of the interrogation
#
centers tarnished the credentials of Indian democracy while feeding the ranks of militancy.
#
And as violence rose, security deployment went up further and so did the number of interrogation
#
Meanwhile, Pakistan had over the years established an efficient network of informants, couriers,
#
gossip mongers and overground workers with extensive funding channels.
#
As it pumped in more money and militants into Kashmir, India increased its own deployment
#
of security forces and created even more interrogation centers.
#
The business of militancy was flourishing.
#
So, you know, before I come to the nineties and, you know, ask you to elaborate on how
#
all of this spun out of control, a tangential thought, which is a few years ago, I read
#
this great book by David Galula called Counter-Insurgency Warfare.
#
And you know, a lot of the lessons in that are lessons that, for example, speak to the
#
mistakes that the U.S. made in Vietnam or that we made in Kashmir throughout or that
#
people have always made fighting counter-insurgents, where Galula's fundamental point, made by
#
many others and learned by the U.S. to some extent after the invasion of Iraq went out
#
of whack, was that you don't fight a counter-insurgency just by defeating that proximate bunch of
#
people who turn up as militants and, you know, just getting rid of them and killing them.
#
It involves really getting the local people on your side.
#
Lawrence once spoke about how, you know, beating a counter-insurgency is like eating soup with
#
It's incredibly difficult.
#
And the typical formula for that, which, you know, again comes from Galula, is that it
#
has to be 20% military, 80% political.
#
And it seems to me that at some level, this lesson, like, first of all, the Indian establishment
#
took completely the wrong approach to it.
#
Almost none of it was political.
#
It was really 100% military, from what it would seem to me.
#
And it continues that way.
#
The thinking still percolates that way, and that sense of you need to gain the trust of
#
the local people and all of that simply doesn't happen.
#
So tell me about, you know, one, your views on this.
#
And you know, so many people within the security establishment.
#
Was there a sense that this should be done differently?
#
Or even looking back in hindsight today, that this could have been done differently.
#
Like, I read this great book by David Devdas called A Generation of Rage in Kashmir, where
#
he postulates that, you know, the Kashmir problem was kind of improving by the middle
#
You know, Vajpayee spoke to Musharraf and, or was it Nawaz Sharif, I forget.
#
But you had talks happening, you had things calming down, there was a new generation of
#
people in Kashmir who wanted jobs, who wanted economic progress, all of that.
#
But the security establishment that was there just continued with their oppressive ways,
#
torturing innocent people, building narratives, and that just disenchanted an entirely new
#
generation and then we entered another spiral at that point in time.
#
So just at an attitudinal level, just at that level of understanding that fine, at one hand
#
there is a terrorism problem, Pakistan is sending people, all that is happening.
#
You know, we need to beat that back with a firm hand.
#
But at the same time, you also need to do the 80% politics to go with the 20% military
#
and that was never done.
#
First of all, would you agree with it and if so, is there a sense of recognition of
#
that within the establishment, even in hindsight, even now after the ship has sailed?
#
I think if you look at the present government, it's a very securitized, communalized view
#
of Kashmir, which is very unfortunate, which might get them immediate votes in the rest
#
But it is disastrous for India, if you ask me, for democracy, Indian democracy.
#
In the past, you're right, there have been efforts, there have been moments when we thought
#
there is a breakthrough coming, especially in 2000 during the Hezbollah-Mujahedin-Nadar
#
And if that ceasefire, while it was called off from Pakistan by Salahuddin, because I
#
had interviewed Abdul Majid, the military commander on ground, and there were enough
#
people on ground who were supporting that efforts at peace and it could have been a
#
But my own reading those days, because I was actively reporting, is that many within the
#
Indian system did not want any risky affair, which could bring peace into Kashmir, because
#
by then, our military leadership, our intelligence leadership, leadership of the paramilitary
#
forces, etc., etc., a generation of them had all earned their medals and uploads in
#
They had tasted power, unbridled power, and then in that military is also to be blamed
#
They almost actively scuttled or misled the political establishment, otherwise we could
#
There have been moments in all through during watch face time, there was moments when we
#
thought we are very close to peace.
#
But I think that is where the agencies played dirty and people created their own narratives.
#
If there was proper accountability and proper audit of the agencies and Kashmir situation,
#
I think we could have found breakthroughs at various points of time.
#
See what happens that many societies have grievances, but a mature democracy would find
#
its ways like the Irish problem or others, would find political means of mellowing it
#
down and weaning away the anger over a period of time, and that's a very patient political
#
If I'm not wrong, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Ireland ran for over a decade,
#
decade and a half before it punished a policeman or anybody.
#
So it's a very patient, it's a very demanding task and nation building itself is a very
#
I think our political leadership failed on both ends and Kashmir became the prime example.
#
But mind you, not just Kashmir, if you look at Nagaland, Northeast, all of it, we have
#
a very, very poor track record in dealing with militancy.
#
Globally post-Second World War, the average militancy has been, I think, eight to ten
#
Within that, either it is defeated or political solutions are found.
#
But in our country, the Naga insurgency problem continues to date after, started in independence,
#
So in all these places, if you dispassionately look from a perspective of state building
#
politically, you will realize that it is the lack of accountability of our agencies, including
#
our military, while it's operating on ground, that has led to this crisis and to the million
#
mutinies that you're witnessing today.
#
Yeah, and I had a very memorable episode with Srinath Raghavan right after 370 was repealed,
#
which is to date the most downloaded episode of my podcast.
#
And it is really good because Srinath is such an amazing historian.
#
Now, one of the things that you've pointed out is how these security agencies, many of
#
which the common man may not even be aware of, have proliferated, where at one point
#
you write code, the army is only one piece of the Indian security web in the valley.
#
Until the 1960s, the IB was India's prime and only federal intelligence agency dealing
#
By the late 60s, RNAW was established to deal with external intelligence within a few years,
#
started its operation in Kashmir.
#
As India struggled with internal strife and external threats, new intelligence agencies
#
and security arms were added.
#
Almost two dozen intelligence agencies of various kinds exist in India today.
#
Some are part of larger forces like the paramilitary or state police, and others are standalone
#
Many of them have a significant presence in Kashmir, it's not good.
#
Now, what also strikes me about that is incentive theme that has played out across pretty much
#
all my episodes about how people respond to incentives, and there are two kinds of incentives
#
And one is just a larger incentives, like one of the things that we have seen from the
#
Pakistani military being so powerful out there is that they need to keep Kashmir on the boil
#
always alive because that is where they get a lot of their power and their budgets and
#
their justifications and all of the narratives that they use to thrive.
#
Similarly, even for the Indian military establishment, it is in their interest to have an enemy because
#
that is then their justification.
#
If suddenly we were guaranteed eternal peace by some miracle, military establishments would
#
So in a sense, there is that at a larger level, there is that imperative to keep the pot boiling.
#
At a smaller level also, there are all kinds of incentives in play, like one is power always
#
corrupts when your security establishment gets so much power in Kashmir, where they're
#
giving away building contracts and there are so many opportunities of corruption, they're
#
obviously never going to let it go and they're never going to do anything that could diminish
#
their presence and their power in the area.
#
And also direct incentives, like for example, security forces at the time as you have written
#
about as David Devdas wrote about in his books, were rewarded for quote unquote kills.
#
The more people you killed, the greater the reward and that led to a position where all
#
the time repeatedly and you've of course highlighted some egregious episodes of this, but all the
#
time people were being framed and killed in fake encounters as terrorists so that people
#
could get reward for kills in a different context in the context of Bombay, which we'll
#
You point out how informers were in fact expected to radicalize young Muslims.
#
So those young Muslims could then be picked up by the security establishment, which is
#
just crazy and this is almost ubiquitous in the sense that about Punjab, which I'd like
#
to talk about next, about Punjab, you also mentioned that a similar incentive existed,
#
which led to all kinds of innocent people being constantly picked up and killed off.
#
And this reminds me of the Cobra effect, where in colonial times, the British authorities,
#
they had a problem of too many Cobras in Delhi.
#
So they offered incentives for getting rid of Cobras, they said for every dead Cobra
#
that you bring in, we'll pay you some money.
#
And what happened is what you would expect, people started breeding Cobras to get some
#
of that money, then the establishment realized that this is not working out, so they removed
#
the reward and then the people who were breeding Cobras, let the Cobras lose and you actually
#
had more Cobras than before.
#
I don't know if you'd agree that that seems to be an apt metaphor.
#
So how earlier you said you were pessimistic about liberal democracy.
#
Now just looking at the incentives of the situation here, like talking, continuing on
#
Kashmir for a moment before we get to Punjab, you know, how could things ever get better?
#
I mean, were they causes of optimism?
#
What could have reversed this?
#
Were there efforts to reverse this?
#
Like you point out that, you know, you were in Kashmir for a while, you met Mr. Dhar while
#
he was, you know, negotiating for peace with India, and of course he got brutally murdered
#
soon after that, and those efforts came to nothing.
#
So does this become an inevitable downward spiral, that once you enter this situation
#
where a powerful security apparatus is given power, that, you know, in a country where
#
there are no safeguards, where, you know, where this kind of structure is thereby designed,
#
what are your thoughts on this?
#
Is this one of the reasons you're pessimistic?
#
And if so, when you speak about your wanting to write because the writing makes a difference,
#
can it make a difference to this?
#
The first part, which is that, can it be undone, the incentive structures, et cetera, et cetera?
#
Today, you know, as you know, the kills part, so militants are graded A, B, C, D, and depending
#
upon the grade of militant that you kill, there are rewards available to policemen,
#
Those, obviously, that reward system has been completely corrupted also.
#
The security agencies have built such complex infrastructures and power centers within Kashmir.
#
In fact, in about 10 years ago, there was very credible inputs about how a section of
#
the army was orchestrating grenade throwing because violence was going down in Kashmir.
#
So it can be dismantled.
#
You need strong, moralistic, political leadership committed to the idea of a democratic India,
#
not to some fantasy of a majoritarian state, not to the fantasy of some, you know, oligarchy
#
If you are committed to liberal democratic ideas, it's a patient process, but it's a
#
doable process because there are n number of examples around the world where you have
#
seen corrupted democracies.
#
For example, in the USA, the Gilded Age gave way to a liberal democratic phase.
#
In the UK, you have had insurgencies, the Irish rebels bombing London and other places.
#
You have seen n number of such cases.
#
So it's not that democracies can't mature.
#
But that maturing of democracy is not achieved through elections.
#
It is achieved through the emergence of leaders who are committed to democratic ideals.
#
And that is one of the causes of my pessimism because even leaders who have emerged in recent
#
times do not give me the hope of democracy because they all turned out to be little people
#
in pursuit of power, pretending to be Gandhi, but deep inside very small minded men stuck
#
on petty power, you know.
#
So that's a cause of pessimism.
#
But to answer your question, it can be dismantled.
#
Countries have done it.
#
Come to the second question, whether writing makes an impact.
#
Writing is the only thing that will make an impact.
#
Writing is what will trigger revolutions.
#
Writing is what will get people on the streets.
#
Writing is what will cause protests.
#
Writing is what will make people think.
#
Writing is what will make people talk loudly in the public square.
#
You know what I'm saying?
#
I absolutely know what you're saying.
#
And it is so inspiring, your writing and podcasting, who knows.
#
But you know, just to push back on the earlier question, like one, I would argue that or
#
rather, I have a question, like the examples you pointed to are kind of different.
#
They don't have to do with the structure of the state.
#
Like sure, you know, the Irish problem is a political problem.
#
I agree that political problems are solvable over a period of time, if there is will.
#
And also there is, one can imagine incentives for the politicians to solve those problems,
#
But here, the problem that we have is a classic problem of a state becoming more and more
#
powerful and bigger and bigger with states tend to do power constantly corrupting.
#
And you enter this kind of a vicious cycle.
#
Is there anywhere in the world where something like that has changed, where an autocratic
#
state has actually been reigned in using democratic methods, like not a war or a coup or whatever?
#
Can you think of an example where that has actually happened?
#
So I don't know whether I would be able to give an appropriate example.
#
But I would say that what the US saw in the last century, if you take the pre Second World
#
War period, and what happened later, there are a lot of parallels to what's happening
#
So there were robber barons, there was the church had more political influence, probably.
#
So there have been changes.
#
But that didn't have anything to do with the structure of the state.
#
Yeah, that is true structure of the state.
#
So you know, our problem is that problem that you're pointing out is not a problem that
#
The state becoming more and more powerful, the powerful state can be dismantled in favor
#
of a more republic, more liberal state, republic state is a doable process.
#
If you have strong leaderships at both at the political level and judiciary level, and
#
Right now we are living through an era of Pygmies.
#
And so it looks very intimidating to dismantle the powerful state sector, right?
#
But when giants come, it won't be impossible is my take.
#
My pushback on that is that we are living in an age of Pygmies, because the incentives
#
are designed to produce Pygmies, like you're speaking of an entitled moralistic leadership,
#
those kind of people won't even enter politics to begin with, because it's pointless.
#
And if they do enter politics, you know, they'll get corroded by the process, still none of
#
the moralism actually remains by the time they get to wherever they want to get to it.
#
So it's all signaling and posturing.
#
By that point, I think the giants are more in other areas, like writing the area that
#
you are in politics, I think will, you know, so it just feels like a vicious circle to
#
But you know, equally, what makes me positive sometimes is that technology can empower individuals,
#
so who knows what will happen in the future.
#
But as of now, if the system is to be changed, it can only be changed by those who are benefiting
#
So why would they change it?
#
So we get caught in this kind of complicated.
#
But Amit, history is not a logical moment.
#
History is a lot of accidents and incidents.
#
So did you 20 years ago, did you think that there could be an Indian who will donate most
#
of his life saving, which is substantially more than what we can imagine, somebody like
#
a Premji would come along?
#
I would actually assume that someone like a Premji would inevitably come along in private
#
life because there have been examples like that in public life, including some of the
#
robber barons that you mentioned earlier, say someone like Rockefeller.
#
But I would not imagine that kind of a public spirit in government, in politics, which is
#
where I'm happy to be proved wrong if it ever happens, which is why I ask.
#
I'll come to you, Amit, in 2009, I used to be taunted by my bosses saying that what corruption
#
stories are you bringing?
#
I would bring some scams, some allegations, you know, some audit report.
#
They would all say that nobody's interested in these stories.
#
And they were true because it triggered nothing.
#
2G scam had happened in 2008.
#
But by 2010, this country went into a different frenzy that you had millions of middle class
#
people out on the streets, the same or many of them today who are communal, who are supporting
#
a majority of the state, they were out on the streets demanding, I mean, they didn't
#
know what Lokpal meant, but they were already a corruption free society, right?
#
And mind you, if you look at Ahmadi party, I mean, I'm not a supporter of the party,
#
the time frame within which a very powerful political movement is unbelievable, right?
#
On very little resources.
#
You cannot rule out the happenstance that the future holds and potentials.
#
Let's not underestimate, see, India, despite all of these efforts, India still has a very
#
And on a bad day, not even bad day, on a normal day for decades, Indian democracy has been
#
held on the shoulders, has been carried forward by few individuals, spirited lawyers, some
#
journalists, some activists.
#
That's a reality because our institutions have not been maturing enough well.
#
So you can never predict what could be in the stores.
#
So that is optimism with which I write and I talk because we are writing against people
#
who might have a lot of power today.
#
But I know that if they were to misuse the power beyond a point, the very people who
#
are supporting them will rise up in revolt.
#
Yeah, and that's a great point about civil society and indeed one of the, but possibly
#
the highlight of the last two years, which have been a very dismal time, but the highlight
#
of the last two years in terms of what's been happening in the public space is how civil
#
society protested against NRC, you know, where you had young people across the country coming
#
out and waving the preamble like who would have thunked, I wish it was the Ambedkar version
#
of the preamble and not the Indira Gandhi version with the toxic word socialism thrown
#
in with all its state coercion and all of that.
#
But regardless, that's still heartening.
#
So hopefully things change.
#
Let's talk about Punjab now, because in a sense, what unfolded later in Kashmir in terms
#
of what the security establishment did and the lessons it learned was something that
#
you also see mirrored in the Punjab problem, where it is actually Indira Gandhi, after
#
losing the elections post the emergency, realizes that the party is doing really badly in Congress.
#
They are coming third there, they need someone to counteract the Akali Dal and Sanjay Gandhi,
#
you mentioned in your book, meets with a couple of potential candidates.
#
The first one doesn't look fierce enough.
#
So he eventually chooses Bhindranwale.
#
So Bhindranwale was really therefore a creation of, arose out of a political imperative and
#
was then given shape by the security establishment and protected by it till it got to a point
#
where the incentives diverged.
#
And you also point out, for example, how Bhindranwale did his first killing of a newspaper publisher.
#
He was actually protected for a while by Gyanizal Singh, who would go on to become India's
#
president and who once said that he would clean toilets for Indira Gandhi if he was
#
asked to and Bhajan Lal, the chief minister of Haryana.
#
So tell me a bit about that sort of period and the lessons we learned, like the 80s hold
#
It's really interesting that, you know, both Indira and Rajiv, in a sense, were killed
#
by monsters that they created.
#
In Rajiv's case, of course, the monster was partly created by his mother as well.
#
But the Bhindranwale monster was created by Indira, the LTTE around the same time, late
#
70s, was propped up by the security establishment and so on.
#
So tell me a bit about that period and especially from the prism that is there in your book
#
of watching the security establishment at play and what those events reveal about it
#
and how those lessons then go on to, you know, the 87 elections in Kashmir and what happens
#
See, one of the worst things about Indira Gandhi, if I may say, was that she did not
#
look across to Pakistan and draw the right lessons.
#
There already was enough lessons about the monsters rising, how when the state start
#
creating militants, terrorists, etc., for state purpose, it will devour the states,
#
And she made these mistakes.
#
And if you really look at it impartially, in many ways, she is responsible for her own
#
killings and her son's killings.
#
So beyond a point in an Asian state, armed insurgencies, if they become part of the state
#
tool, then it is going to have disastrous consequences.
#
And we played with it in the 70s and 80s.
#
And Punjab problem, if you look at it, while there have been, you know, all kinds of disgruntlement
#
within Punjab since the 47 Akali issue, etc., if Bindranwale was not propped up and provided
#
the resources that the Congress provided and the support provided, we would not have had
#
an Operation Blue Star, we probably would not have had the assassination of Indira Gandhi
#
and we would not have had the anti-Muslim pogrom.
#
And India would have been a much more liberal, safer place.
#
All of this happened because of a very nasty, short-sighted pursuit of power in Punjab.
#
And not for nationally, just for a state.
#
And see what it came up with.
#
And when it began to get out of hand, what does the state do?
#
State securitize the problem.
#
You deploy policemen with, and military for a short while, but policemen with all kinds
#
of power, saying that go, kill, kidnap, rape, do what you want, but I want peace.
#
That's thuggery, that is cruelty, that is murder, that's killing.
#
So you blessed a generation of policemen out there to become state-sponsored killers.
#
And vicious cycle that continues to play even today.
#
Even today, thousands of families in Punjab and abroad, meaning Sikhs, they don't know
#
where their dear ones are.
#
People have just disappeared because police has kidnapped and killed and tortured and
#
militants killed on the other side.
#
But the discussion cannot be drawing a parity between the militants and police.
#
So what, militants are killing, so we will also kill.
#
Militants are militants.
#
They are not the state.
#
The state has apparatus which is bound by the written constitution and its laws, and
#
And Indira Gandhi, in her whatever strategic vision it was, she empowered, created an LTT
#
out there and other Tamil militants in Sri Lanka.
#
That also had such blowback on India.
#
And look at the cumulative effect of such short-sighted decisions of that era that not
#
only do we have Rajiv Gandhi being assassinated by LTT, we also have a military disaster in
#
Sri Lanka and at the end of it, you have thousands of Tamils butchered in a modern world.
#
And you see the rise of another strong man, strong family in Sri Lanka which is completely
#
So India, unless we do very honest introspection of how our political politicians have been
#
and continues to use state power and violence as a means to further their power, we will
#
not be able to move into a mature democracy.
#
And I say this being very conscious of what's happening today and what the arc of Narendra
#
One of the sort of stories I was very struck by and someone who also must have been inspiring
#
to you for not investigative journalism per se but a kind of investigative zeal is Jaswant
#
Singh Kalra, who I hadn't heard of again till your book and what a remarkable story.
#
Tell me a little bit about him.
#
Yeah, I mean, in fact, of all the people that I have written about, he's probably the most
#
fascinating and one of the most saddest stories because he came from this famed family.
#
His grandfather was a freedom fighter, et cetera, and he is a one who actually in a systematic
#
manner uncovers the police brutality in Punjab and what he does is he goes around collecting
#
details of firewood that is given for funeral pyres and it is a licensed government thing.
#
So there is a logging happening at some end for firewood that is wood that is given for
#
funeral pyres and using that, he proves that the number of people cremated in districts
#
like Amritsar and present-day Tarang Tarang are several times more than what was officially
#
being recorded and he from there, he starts recording the brutality of the state police
#
and the encounter killings and the disappearances and he becomes so powerful that KPS guild
#
then the police comes down to Amritsar to challenge him for public debate, this, that,
#
but Kalra is not intimidated because he is cut from a different kind of cloth and he
#
continues to record two, three thousand disappearance of cases and finally the police got so irritated
#
with him that they just kidnapped him and he's also disappeared.
#
So his legacy continued and during the time he's been kidnapped, the supreme court takes
#
notice of it and there are efforts but the state government and the police lies to the
#
supreme court and Kalra is killed meanwhile but his findings have found judicial approval
#
but that has not brought justice to Punjab because at various stages in the National
#
Human Rights Commission, even supreme court, justice has been watered away and you know
#
because ultimately in India we don't believe in individual liberties, individual rights
#
so it has been watered away even today there are thousands of families in Punjab who are
#
looking for their dear ones something to know about it but it was Kalra who actually triggered
#
that fight back and that's what I was saying that you know history is very, very, you can't
#
say if you had met Kalra as a young man probably you would not predict that this man could
#
shake up the entire Punjab story and even today there are youngsters, young lawyers
#
I know who are carrying on with Kalra's fight, very smart lawyers.
#
So it's a long drawn battle, it's like the Bhopal gas tragedy, the fighters live on,
#
they are there, they continue to fight, we may not know their fight.
#
So I am not an expert on Kalra or Punjab, I just came across his story and I said oh
#
this fits into what I have been saying so I read about him and wrote about him.
#
I wish I had known about him much long ago, I mean I wish I had met him because he would
#
have been such an inspiration figure.
#
I mean what a smart investigative strategy to go looking for the wood that is used for
#
the fires, I mean which policeman would think that his crime would be captured in a log
#
kept on the wood that is supplied.
#
I mean to me it's like the highest standards, the gold standard of investigative journalism
#
So he is, yeah but all of it is a tragedy, he was also killed.
#
But the man accused of killing him, the police officer, he finally committed suicide.
#
Yeah but I mean that's a scant consolation, no but it's a kind of good story that could
#
so easily be made into a film or a web series that you know you have these incentives where
#
they are being rewarded for killing terrorists so you assume that they must be killing lots
#
of innocent people but how the hell do you prove it then you figure out that wait a second
#
the police has to cremate these people for which they have to buy wood and then he goes
#
off and then he you know does an audit of all the firewood sold in the state and he
#
calculates so many thousands of people have been killed and then eventually he is abducted
#
by the police, tortured, killed, chopped up and the body parts thrown in the sattelage.
#
Absolutely a crazy story and you also point out that this is not really an outlier, it's
#
probably an outlier in terms of the ingenuity but how activists were treated very much par
#
for the course you speak about people like Ram Singh Billing, Ajit Singh Bans, Param
#
Satinjar, Ajit Singh, Malvinder Singh, Malli, Jagvinder Singh and these are like lawyers,
#
these are people you would imagine would have some kind of you know influence or ways of
#
protecting themselves or whatever but you know they all disappear and this is all just
#
par for the course and what happens.
#
Yeah the Punjabis and Punjab and Kashmir and Nagaland etc are all the same story I mean
#
you know the state let the security apparatus go berserk and policemen thought they are
#
the state and they behaved like one, they just became killer squads and it continues,
#
it continues even today, it has not gotten away I mean it needs to end somewhere.
#
Yeah maybe not in terms of killing but what we see with Bhima Koregaon case which you've
#
also written about so eloquently in your last chapter and you know and some could argue
#
what happened to Stan Swamy is an extrajudicial killing so you know.
#
Now tell me a little bit about Rajiv Gandhi's approach because Rajiv takes power and he's
#
this callow young man perhaps drunk on power to some extent and there are just so many
#
in different contexts so many political missteps that he takes which prove disastrous but one
#
of them of course is the whole IPKF thing which is a classic example of how you know
#
if you create a monster you don't know if you can control it and I wonder if that even
#
has current resonance like you mentioned how you know both Indira and Rajiv were killed
#
by monsters created in a sense by Indira and I wonder how that applies to current day leaders
#
and the monsters that they create, can you control them, where does it all end and when
#
I see political leaders pandering to all these extreme emotions just feels that you know
#
they haven't really learned the lessons of history either.
#
So tell me a little bit about all of that because one of the striking features of that
#
whole IPKF misadventure where basically for listeners who might not be aware Rajiv did
#
a deal with the Sri Lankan government that he will send the Indian peacekeeping force
#
IPKF and you know we'll send our military and we'll take care of your Tamil extremism
#
problem for you and of course the Tamil extremism problem was created by India in the first
#
place and all the security forces stole their political overlords that listen we created
#
them we tell them to put down arms they will put down arms and then they go there and they
#
find that it's a completely different story this is another monster they can't control
#
tell me a bit about that period.
#
To me the story of Prabhagana Rajiv is very interesting that one is a political princeling
#
and the other is a romantic who left studies midways and become a militant and for a short
#
while they were friends Prabhagana was actually flown to Delhi and if I'm not wrong it's
#
Rahul Gandhi who carries his father's Rajiv Gandhi's bulletproof jacket which Rajiv Gandhi
#
gives to Prabhagana and Prabhagana comes back to Jaffna by the time IPKF was landed IPKF
#
flown in from Hyderabad so the GOC of the division told me they went with the tourist
#
maps of Jaffna he said I sent my soldiers out to Hyderabad market to buy tourist maps
#
of Sri Lanka that's that is how we'll prepare they were anyway they land up there and they
#
thought that Prabhagana can be bullied around and they told him to lay down arms and as
#
agreed and one leads to the other and within months the Rajiv Prabhagana friendship collapses
#
and Rajiv sends one of the world's most powerful militaries on an operation which is probably
#
the most dramatic military operation of recent memories I think I can't think of another
#
operation anywhere in the world the operation to capture Prabhagana and his LTT leadership
#
from Jaffna University you have the commando raid and as a helicopter lands the LTT is
#
waiting for them because I think LTT was listening into the radio communication and the troops
#
that are moving on ground towards Jaffna they encounter all kinds of obstacles and there
#
some of them are taken for a ride by Tamils many of them are met with children and women
#
providing cover to LTT militants at the hospital in the civil hospital there in Jaffna whatever
#
may happen Indian military saves militants fired from inside the hospital but for the
#
next two days they've been berserk there butchered and people finally it's it's blackhawked
#
down ten times bigger when Prabhagana disappears from there leaves behind at the at the football
#
ground if I'm not wrong just one injured Indian soldier he said let him be alive so that he
#
can go back and tell his masters what I'm capable of and Prabhagana digs down and stays
#
underground for the next several years plotting his way back and he gets Rajiv so that's
#
it so so even the greatest military is not capable of solving a political problem it
#
has to be a political solution that's that's a big takeaway for me in the story and Prabhagaran
#
crazed by power and once you test violence you can never give it up you can you can become
#
you know people might say that every saint has a past and every criminal has a future
#
and all that but he couldn't give up by the mid of 2000s he could have had an autonomous
#
north east region right everything was in his favor and people like Anton Bailasingham
#
actually told him let's buy this piece let's have an autonomous region whatever no he has
#
to fight for freedom he has to create his country and and he also ends up dead in a
#
backwater in a lake so Rajiv Gandhi in his brashness as a young prime minister he goes
#
into Sri Lanka sends military into Sri Lanka for nothing and pays for it with his life
#
and parallelly in Kashmir with Farooq Abdullah he I mean he lets Farooq have a field day
#
in Kashmir and they manipulate selections and Kashmir erupts in violence and the violence
#
continues till date so legacy of Rajiv Gandhi while there are a lot of good things we can
#
talk about him and he truly had a very visionary idea for India but practically on ground
#
he messed up the Indian democracy project big time very true and and the 87 elections
#
as you've pointed out was rigged so blatantly that an entire generation of militants were
#
created from there like people like you mentioned people like Saeed Salahuddin, Saeed Ali Shah
#
Ajilani, Yasin Malik, Javed Mir, Shabeer Shah's brother Mohammed Saeed Shah they were all you
#
know taking part in the elections trying to be part of the democratic process but once
#
the whole thing was rigged they said forget it this is we're not going to get anything
#
done this way and of course ever one can imagine why they thought that way it was rational
#
and so they go into militancy and everything kind of gradually begins to go to hell so
#
that's that's one interesting stand there let's move back like there are really two
#
more places I want to talk about where you've got interesting narratives in your book and
#
I'll save Gujarat for last because I think that that narrative of the Gujarat model as
#
it were of the security establishment is something that has great resonance for what is happening
#
right now at a national level so we'll save that for last but tell me a little bit about
#
Mumbai you know the first big section of your book which could have been a book in itself
#
absolutely gripping section is about Mumbai is about you know this friend that you made
#
there called Wahid you know and there is so much happening there so how did you like what
#
you have done in that interesting section is in a very novelistic way you've interspersed
#
a personal narrative of this person called Wahid and made him such a flesh and blood
#
real life figure that the reader empathizes with and tied in the rest of the narrative
#
of whatever is happening with the legit terrorism that is there with the security establishment
#
doing all the nonsense that it is doing with not only the way they fight the legit terrorism
#
but also the way they keep kind of framing people and victimizing poor Muslims like Wahid
#
himself it's it's really interesting so how did all of this begin to take shape in your
#
mind and when did you sort of come to the conclusion that this is a major story that
#
what is happening in Mumbai the framing of these people the way the security establishment
#
kind of has been working here you know tell me about your impetus of looking deeper into
#
that and was this perhaps the first instance of when you really got to see the depths of
#
depravity that the security establishment can fall prey to?
#
So when I began my book Wahid was not a big subject of my book I was looking at writing
#
about the business of terror is that and I started research so in fact my original chapterization
#
is the book was in the reverse it begins with Kashmir and and Wahid was the second part
#
it was editor Ajita who said that let's reverse it see I being a beat reporter I knew that
#
is 2006 when the train bomb blast happened the claims made by the ATS of Maharashtra
#
was completely fake and forced and as a reporter I also knew that later the real terrorists
#
Indian Mujahidin terrorists were caught and they had owned up to the bombings so I knew
#
that I'm going to talk about it but what I did not realize was that Wahid and his other
#
co-accused have filed copious amounts of documents in the trial court detailing the torture that
#
they went through detailing the depravity of the Indian security establishment because
#
I think at some level they were innocent probably and or they were very committed jihadis whatever
#
it is they should great trust faith and courage in the judiciary of India and that's what
#
attracted me when I started interacting with Wahid I realized look these guy everything
#
that he's saying is there out somewhere recorded so when you're writing about against powerful
#
institutions and people while they could harass you one thing that I wanted to be sure which
#
as a journalist is my duty is to ensure that you don't make wild allegations which are
#
not backed by documents and in his case it's pure gold while he lives were ruined they
#
have recorded that and I hope whatever was recorded in that court proceedings I hope
#
future police officers and intelligence officers of this country would read and draw the right
#
lessons from that those documentations the Indian police service should put its head
#
you know down in shame for the embarrassing way in which many of their so-called senior
#
IPS officers behaved in their case so since 2006 I knew that this was a fake claim and
#
the real terrorists have not been caught but when I started meeting with Wahid I realized
#
that his story actually goes back and his entire life took a turn after 9-11 so it was
#
a waves of 9-11 attacks that hits the Bombay slum where Wahid lived and the US attack happens
#
India decides to act and overnight Simi the student Islamic movement of India has declared
#
a terrorist organization and police around the country is going around looking for Simi
#
terrorists and at Parkside police station which is near Wahid's house the police as
#
usual with very few Muslims on its ranks reaches out to informants and as you know informants
#
in most societies are petty criminals or some with some criminal background etc so the local
#
mosque one of the Mullahs preacher there he tells who had a kundak who had some score
#
to settle with Wahid tells the police that Wahid is a Simi member police picks him up
#
and that day his life changes for the next 10-15 years from a school teacher with some
#
conservative views of Islamic views that religious views that Wahid have which is his right he
#
is turned into a Simi terrorist and by 2013 the court throws out those claims and later
#
2014 I think Wahid is executed also but life is ruined and nobody is responsible no policeman
#
has paid for it and there are hundreds of such policemen around the country who have
#
fake encounters who have killed people ruined people's lives because of either ill-information
#
or some rivalry or revenge until we bring in accountability we'll have more and more
#
Wahids being framed by this outstanding hero because he at least had the courage to record
#
his story in the courts and he should trust what we what we don't know is that the stories
#
of people who do not have the faith and courage to do this to document their experiences so
#
if you look at him Wahid is tortured and there are torture chambers in ATS office in Mumbai
#
where in the room the AC is put at full blast and he is stripped naked and there are industrial
#
belts kept there returned such bolne wala patta and there are posters saying that even
#
the deaf and dumb will speak here I mean is that police or is that some underworld dons
#
I actually want to read out those couple of paraas because I just want all the listeners
#
to you know listen to it and pick up your book and I think they're important paragraphs
#
so I'll read this out and first you set it up and this is after he's being arrested at
#
one point in time and he's taken to this ATS office and you write quote Wahid already
#
knew that this reputation was anything but true from the school he was taken to the ATSC
#
Kala Chowki office and straight to a very odd room he vividly recalls it describing
#
the room as looking like the set of a cheap Bollywood film it had no windows and its walls
#
were painted white much later he realized that the wall had two layers to make it soundproof
#
in the middle was a table and a chair a bright light was on on the table were syringes batons
#
coins iodex gel electric wires and a water pipe a large truck tire hung at one end there
#
was a big belt the kind used in factories which are several inches broad with slogans
#
on it such bol patta meri aawaz suno idhar goonga bhi bolta hai and then there were handcuffs
#
and old newspapers even before he could make sense of the lay of the room Wahid was asked
#
to strip naked the AC was on full blast and the cement floor was freezing as a naked Wahid
#
stood shivering raghuvanshi walked in wearing civvies it must have been around 12.30 pm
#
wahid estimates pointing his finger at wahid raghuvanshi asked who is this wahid sir a
#
subordinate replied raghuvanshi took a step forward and kicked wahid in his groin stop
#
quote and then you go on to say like basically raghuvanshi who is this police officer leading
#
this leading the ATS at the time wants him to confess to hosting pakistani militants in
#
his house for a couple of days and he he says hey i'm you know that didn't happen and then
#
you continue your description quote after half an hour of the dramatic interrogation
#
the ATS chief left issuing instructions i want a photo of him jumping so warm him up
#
he slapped wahid and said i am not used to know the gentleman cop and you put this in
#
quotes because that's how he'd been described earlier the gentleman cop walked out after
#
their boss's departure the other policeman told wahid to accept everything he refused
#
and then their torture shifted to a new gear the policeman pulled out a bottle of surya
#
prakash oil an ayurvedic mix of oils extracted from eucalyptus clove mint and camphor prescribed
#
for pain relief but in the interrogation rooms of the ATS the oil was not being put to use
#
as per the directions of dm patel pharma private limited but as a tool in the war on terror
#
the team thrust a tube into wahid's rectum and injected the oil into his body within
#
a few minutes his body was on fire he started jumping what the ATS chief wanted his subordinates
#
and surya prakash oil had delivered in a few minutes stop quote and what we see happening
#
here and by the way wahid was you know acquitted later by the court and i wanted to read this
#
bit out because i just feel it's dramatic and everyone needs to you know read the entire
#
book not just details of this and wahid was later acquitted and what was happening at
#
this moment in time was that you know surya vanshi and the mumbai police commissioner
#
a.n roy and the entire security establishment there was intent on fixing the blame of the
#
bomb blast which you know ripped through those trains on someone and not leave it as a case
#
unsolved and because they couldn't find the real perpetrators they caught this guy and
#
later on when people from the indian mujahideen were apprehended in separate case they actually
#
confessed to the bomb blast gave details and so on and so forth but the case against these
#
people continued nevertheless and in fact while you know reading your book i did some
#
searches and came across this clip of raghu vanshi being interrogated by arnab goswami
#
of all people in 2016 where you know arnab is quizzing him on you know why the other
#
agencies ib or cbi i forgot came out with different conclusions and he had these conclusions
#
but let that part my question is on you know what people call the street light effect have
#
you heard of the street light effect no so the street light effect takes its name from
#
this old anecdote that there is a drunk guy searching under a street light for something
#
so a policeman comes to him and says what are you searching for and he says oh i dropped
#
so and so thing and so i'm searching for it so the policeman helps him and after a while
#
the policeman asks him that did you drop it here and the drunk guy says no no i dropped
#
it in the park there so he says and why are you searching here so he said because the
#
park is dark there's light here so i'm searching here and that seems to me to be an apt metaphor
#
for the way security agencies in india do so much of their investigation that they don't
#
really care about the truth they'll just do what is convenient so if something happens
#
you have so much power it is far more convenient for you to pick up a few poor muslims get
#
confessions out of some of them torture them till some of them turn approvers and build
#
these false cases and oh my god it's an inconvenience if the real culprits run up later because
#
you just want the case solved and you want it over with and so you're searching under
#
the street light so does this seem like an accurate metaphor and also in your book this
#
just happens time and time again it's almost institutionalized so tell me a little bit
#
about this and and and what leads to this kind of mindset like at some level it is that
#
anti-muslim nature which we spoke about earlier but is that just state or are the incentives
#
really out of whack that finding the real criminals is not important lowering the number
#
of unsolved cases matters what's happening here and tell my listeners how widespread
#
is this all of it amit but beyond all that there is an utter and complete lack of respect
#
for the victims of this bomb blast there are hundreds of people hindus muslims christians
#
all kinds of faith and i would presume largely hindus who have lost their dear ones they
#
want to know who killed their dear ones who destroyed their families our police officers
#
these police officers have no respect for them forget about the anti-muslim bias our
#
police officers don't have any respect for those grieving souls and that is where we
#
should begin the conversation and we should not be talking about anti-muslim bias forget
#
the muslims tell me who killed my dear one in that bomb blast for all the politics that
#
we talk about for all the anti-muslim bias in the organization i am saying that don't
#
you have any sympathy or any concern about the quest for closure that the grieving families
#
have and this is not just in mumbai you find this across the country you this you find
#
this in in gujarat over and over again in encounter killings you find this in naxal
#
areas you find this in manipur you find this in down south in tamil nadu recently all over
#
it's rampant our police forces are also in many ways uniformed gundas and and a few hundred
#
a few thousand people are killed in their you know in their custody annually so it's
#
not an isolated thing it's not even it's it's not democratic i mean how can you how
#
can we call ourselves a democracy if in the metropolis of ours in the most important city
#
of ours you have a interrogation chambers where they can do anything and your judiciary
#
has not and and and you know when indian mujahideen people owned up to the bombing why then the
#
group went to appeal so indian mujahideen people in the court the key witness he was
#
slightly shaky and did not own up completely because obviously legal pressure xfx whatever
#
when they appealed the for the police officer who interrogated the indian mujahideen to
#
be brought to be called in as a witness the appeal ended to supreme god and supreme god
#
chief justice god uh bless his uh bless him and other officers who said that it will set
#
a wrong precedent he wasn't bothered about the probably the 12 innocence being accused
#
as dreaded terrorist he was bothered about wrong precedents so from the highest judiciary
#
to the lowest courtroom from the highest office of police and intelligence to lower we have
#
become so insensitive we are not even bothered about providing closure to the grieving families
#
of ours forget about the muslim biases forget about the way we dehumanized uh muslims dalits
#
dehumanize you know other people kashmiris manipuris northeast whatever so you know if
#
you if you see in the book i writing with angst about many such instances which of which
#
i could access records it's only miniscule part of what's happening on a daily basis
#
the existence of an average indian is a cruel uh existence he is being tortured he's he's
#
afraid of going to a police station which in which country will a person be afraid of
#
going into a police station in a in which democracy can a ordinary human being be afraid
#
of going into police station in which democracy will the lawyers tell their clients don't
#
go to police avoid going to police at any cost this is advice that people like me i
#
have received this advice no no no let's not do if there are occasions when some shit some
#
notice somebody sends you know the lawyer is saying no no let's avoid police because
#
they can say anything they can frame anything look at what's happening in uttarpuradesh
#
i mean they're killing left right and center man which which law book rule book of this
#
country allows police to kill so it agitates me i mean to to think it's not about anti
#
being anti-muslim it's just cruel animals and and it's not that we don't have good
#
police officers we have got hundreds and thousands of good policemen out there they're all quiet
#
they just do their job and go home it's these thugs who are getting to power because they're
#
satisfying political masters and because they become heroes encounter cops it's unbelievable
#
yeah in the context of some of them i'm reminded of hannah arendt's phrase the banality of evil
#
people who look like completely normal sida sadha people going around doing all of these things
#
there are some like moving stories from this time as well like you talk about vinod bhat for example
#
the officer who uh you know is under pressure from uh the police commissioner a and roy and
#
this kp raghu when she fell out to file charge sheets against these people and he doesn't want
#
to because he can see that it's all trumped up and because he doesn't want to they implicate
#
his wife in another case and eventually he commits suicide in in this really bizarre way that
#
while crossing the uh you know he's on the railway tracks and a train runs over him and
#
he's got his official car waiting there's no reason for him at all to be on the platform
#
it's his bizarre thing and you also point out how manmohan singh at the time sent a cbi officer he
#
trusted to oversee the investigation and that person you know while he was there saw this
#
pakistani citizen being interrogated there and clearly he had nothing to do with it and when
#
he went back to delhi he heard news about how this same pakistani citizen was had now been arrested
#
and implicated and all of that uh in this complete cock and bull story and and and by the way the
#
pakistani citizen as it happened had crossed over from pakistan in gujarat where the gentleman
#
called dj vansara who the features in different parts of your book he's like popping up everywhere
#
had him sent to bombay let's talk about gujarat now partly because you know while you were
#
speaking it also sort of struck me as incredibly naive to expect the security establishment for
#
example to care about the truth the incentives are not about caring for the truth the incentives
#
are about building the kind of narratives that suits them and their political masters and a
#
classic example of that really is what happened in 2002 in gujarat especially how the godhra
#
narrative changed where the godhra incident happens and there are there's enough credible
#
deposition that it was not a pre-planned thing it was just one of those things it happened
#
great tragedy and then you have modi landing up and then alleging that the isi has caused it
#
and the you know making the decision to take the bodies from godhra to amedabad and you know and
#
everything else that subsequently happened but it is not just the riots it's just the way that
#
the security establishment is used through the years over there in a way that you call the gujarat
#
model tell me more about that i mean i hope you agree with me that there is no other model in
#
gujarat definitely no no economic model that's kind of what the results indicate i mean it's
#
very clear even from modi's record over the last seven years that in terms of economics he is
#
as oppressive and autocratic as people before him really i mean i often say that he got the
#
top-down economic planning model from nehru and the autocratic impulses from indira so it is
#
ironic that he keeps blaming those two i think indira in particular or even sanjay gandhi is
#
someone who seems a precursor to what modi has become but anyway that's a digression
#
so i i think to me the only model that is out of gujarat is the security architecture
#
because in many ways naredra moody is a beneficiary of the 9-11 attacks in america
#
and it's a few months after that he becomes the chief minister of gujarat and after the godhra
#
tragedy which actually is one of the worst tragedies of independent india he lands up there
#
and for purely i mean the only reason i only logic i can think is political reasons he says
#
it's a conspiracy contrary to what the district collector local police officers and even watch
#
play told the parliament and he brings in a hand-picked officer ragesh asana who is now
#
the delhi police commissioner to investigate his investigation is all centered around conspiracy
#
and as you know the trial court threw out the conspiracy claims while it convicted some people
#
the fact is that they all acted again with the same callousness towards the victims there are
#
50 560 grieving families and hundreds of people have lost their dear ones you owe it to them see
#
and a police officer a law enforcer a political leader at some level you are also my comfort in
#
my moment of grief right it's like doctors so in my moment of grief i want closure any grieving
#
person want closure you never let it happen you did not provide the closure to those victims of
#
godhra instead you created a political spectacle out of it and we know what happened to it i mean
#
i mean the bodies are released from the godhra district custody to vhp leaders which law in this
#
country allows dead bodies to be handed over to strangers because it was they were ordered to do
#
that right and and it has been recorded by now by justice vr krishna has led the citizen's tribunal
#
that it was narendra modi who ordered the bodies to be released and the bodies are go to amada
#
birth and it becomes flies up into communal flare up and what do you what we gain we have
#
thousands of dead families thousands of dead people and thousands grieving both hindus and
#
muslims let's forget it hindu muslim binaries and modi becomes this strong man and from there he
#
goes on to build his so-called gujarat economic model but it's there is no model out there
#
and over the period that he is a chief minister there are a few patterns which you cannot ignore
#
with one being that there have been a spate of fake encounters this is not my claim this is not
#
the claim of any activist these are claims and statements made by gujarat's own police when they
#
were allowed to investigate gujarat's own judicial officers when they were allowed to investigate
#
supreme got monitored committees they all said that there have been all of them have been fake
#
encounters from isha jahan encounter to sorabudin in all of these cases what what is the terrorist
#
coming for terrorist is coming to assassinate narendra modi now was somebody who had control
#
of police trying to create a hero out of modi or was it modi himself decide this is something that
#
should have been investigated and still needs to be investigated but we still don't know we
#
don't know what would happen and he comes to delhi and after he comes to delhi you you find
#
a same pattern happening across india bima koregao case is not the only case in fact
#
i talk about another case where in ranchi they try to create a similar fake narrative of someone
#
trying to assassinate narendra modi bima koregao case is a criminal conspiracy by an arm of the
#
state to frame some of our finest citizens there is no doubt about that i don't think there is
#
any more dispute about it every police officer involved in it and any political master was
#
involved in it they must all be going behind bars they should all be facing trial if we call
#
ourselves a democracy otherwise we should rename our country as a banana republic otherwise we
#
should burn the constitution the in the public square there and say that this constitution has
#
no values bima koregao is a very classic case of what i am trying to argue and gujarat model is
#
the model of security architecture that indira gandhi perfected and rajiv gandhi misused which
#
narendra modi has now taken to a different scale to challenge and ruin and demolish this democracy
#
let's not shy away from being honest that if we don't speak up today our silence is going
#
to ruin the lives of our children and that is one of the reasons why i wrote this book i i really
#
adore my daughter and i i hope she and her generation has a better future and can can live
#
in a meritorious society a meritorious society is only possible if there is mature democracy
#
and we don't have it it's the enemies of our emergence as a mature democracy as a liberal
#
democracy are the ones who are ruling this country and who are in the police force in uniforms
#
in intelligence agencies they need to be reined in otherwise amit you and me we won't even be able
#
to tomorrow sit and discuss like this and mind you you will see the repercussions of me writing
#
this book over the next few months when the same deep state will probably try to finger me and you
#
know what they've been up to in the last few years it is all recorded that adani or ambani
#
and other corporates who are narendra modi's great pals have all carried out serious breach of laws
#
from over invoicing of you know coal and electrical machinery where the fine that the state should
#
receive is five thousand fifteen thousand crore rupees or the reliance geos license is forged
#
instead of investigating those national scandals the income tax and enforcement director are reading
#
small time news startups they're they're they're serving notices on journalists they're coming to
#
they're coming to offices of our little you know small time media outfits and telling them
#
why do you write against the government amit my book is not just about narendra modi rindira gandhi
#
amit you spoke about incentives all through the conversation is there a bigger incentive than
#
your ability to look into the eyes of your children and say that your father or mother was honest
#
today that i did not give into fear is there is there a bigger incentive for a journalist
#
then go home saying that look i did something today i wiped the tear of the last indian
#
there is no bigger incentive here i don't i don't i don't i don't think that
#
materialistic incentives can match the the the incentive of being morally honest i think you
#
know what would be incentives for me and you would not necessarily be incentives for people
#
out there and what we've also seen there like you spoke about people being silent and you know one
#
possible reason for that is not just the apathy people have because they feel they can't do
#
anything but also the chilling effect of what the state does to people who do speak up like
#
and just for the benefit of my listeners i just want to point out that in the bima koregaon case
#
as you know josie just said it's now you know beyond any doubt that they were framed one of
#
the first activists to be arrested was rona wilson forensic analysis has shown conclusively
#
that all the evidence on his computer was actually planted and you know it was hacked and planted
#
and all of that and it's just this extremely complex and sophisticated operation obviously
#
done by an arm of the the security agency now i'm not going to keep you much longer i'm just going
#
to end with some final observations and questions because everyone should go out there and read your
#
book obviously one conversation can't do justice to so many years of work and such a vast narrative
#
you know and there are so many arcs in there there is the arc about how security agencies have created
#
their own militant outfits all over the place it is in kashmir you know salva judum in chattisgarh
#
and the kind of havoc that they create sometimes often even worse than the terrorists you've also
#
written about the fascinating story of afzal guru and the connection with davinder singh
#
that apparently he was asked by davinder singh to come to delhi and to put up these people and
#
you know before that he was just an informer and you've spoken about how so many informers are
#
later framed themselves and davinder singh of course was in the news firstly last year or the
#
year before that when you know he was arrested in kashmir by his own police carrying two terrorists
#
in his car and just recently if i remember correctly there was some news item where you
#
know the state put out this notice saying that they're not going to pursue the case in national
#
security interest or some shit like that whatever that means so is that something you can speak
#
about by the way what is the davinder singh deal davinder singh has been this notorious like many
#
notorious kashmir police officers who have been known for being mixed up with see in the fog of
#
war you know a police officer will have to deal with informants militants etc and i am not
#
stating any state secret when i am saying that afzal guru was a militant who returned home and
#
wanted to try to do lead a normal life but was forced to be an informant with bsf and with
#
police and he was quite notorious in sopor where which is a very pro-militant area he knew that
#
he'll be bumped off by the militants because he was betraying far too many militants so he decided
#
to leave and come to delhi and that is when he says davinder singh called him up and asked him
#
to come down to kashmir and one last job for him this claim that afzal guru was made in the court
#
davinder singh was not refuted his allegation was against a uniformed police officer of this country
#
so i would go by afzal guru until davinder singh comes to court and refutes it right
#
so he's asked to from kashmir bring these people and drop them to delhi who are the people who end
#
up attacking the parliament and afzal guru at the trial court in fact if you know he did not take
#
any legal help he said i don't want any lawyers to help because he told someone who was in jail
#
with him that he has been promised by the police that after the trial and conviction etc he'll be
#
freed he'll be a free man so the deep state that was at work at the parliament attack is something
#
that needs to be investigated it is not a very simple terrorist attack there was arms of the
#
state which were involved in it and again mind you i am not talking some wild conspiracy theory
#
here amit i am talking about for the fate of our children for the future of our children for the
#
future of this democracy truth is our greatest defense for any democracy and i can tell you
#
there are some masters out there in the in the governance structures even today who will say oh
#
you know the collective interest of the country should override that of the individual no
#
an individual empowered with his liberty is the greatest assurance of a state
#
not the otherwise there is nobody out in out there who has the wisdom to decide what is good
#
for the state other than that illiterate voter out on out in that dirty village davinder singh
#
continues to do whatever he was doing finally he was arrested when he was again trying to
#
bring some terrorists to delhi again claims of jnk police not ours but this case is taken over
#
by nia for whatever reason and if nia was to be investigating terror angle or whatever i don't
#
think anything coming what we know is that the state government has decided to to discharge him
#
from government right to compulsory retire him and not to pursue the case expected because we have
#
heard other stories of davinder singh's linkages to higher ups davinder singh is not he is not an
#
outlier as you see he's not he's not a lone wolf he is that visible tip of an iceberg
#
where there are far bigger fishes out there in that iceberg yeah visible tip of an iceberg is
#
a good way to put it though i don't know how fishes get inside icebergs but i get it you know
#
another fascinating strand of your book which i'd like listeners to read for themselves is
#
all about the strand of how the security establishment went easy on hindu terror
#
and on groups like abhinav bharat to the extent that you know you've been as you mentioned in the
#
book you've been told by people that they might have been a creation of the security establishment
#
itself all very scary stuff so there is this you know excellent quote right at the end of
#
your book which i want to read out with the last five words being key quote there is a strange
#
pattern in some of these cases the investigation agency prepares a massive charge sheet running to
#
thousands of pages attaching all kinds of evidence that no one will have the time or patience to go
#
through in detail when these cases go to trial the accused may well be exonerated but in the slow
#
churn of the indian judiciary the process is a punishment stop quote and these words of course
#
the process is the punishment the old cliche and this is what we see in bima koregao this is what
#
we see repeatedly time and again so first of all i got to laud you for your idealism and your
#
courage in writing the book i mean the you know at the start where you'll ambasted rakesh asana
#
and then pointed out that he's a current police commissioner of delhi where you live i was like
#
my god you know how is this guy doing this so tell me a little bit about your future projects if you
#
wish to talk about them and also about the other things you do like earlier you mentioned you were
#
a multitasker there are startups before we started our conversation you told me you were in
#
my part of town in bombay recently because you were or mumbai recently because you were
#
meeting all kinds of interesting film people for different projects and all of that
#
so is there something you'd like to share with what is coming up for you and what would you like
#
to tell not just investigative journalists but also people in civil society who feel animated
#
by these problems but they must be thinking that why should i speak out why should i risk myself
#
you know do the practical thing just now you know it's a chilling effect at work just chill
#
you know it's a very nice book i'll recommend it to friends in person but you know why get why get
#
further into this let shit play out especially if you're elite hindus and you're thinking that
#
you know i am not at danger at any moment in time let me get on with life yes you know at an
#
intellectual level this is shocking but why should i do anything what would you have to
#
tell them for example answering the first part so i i have this media startup where trying to
#
see if i can create a scalable model of investigative journalism which where i can sustain
#
and support rigorous investigative journalism which can be scaled up because the existing
#
models which are dependent upon subscriptions advertisement or reader donations are not very
#
scalable so i'm trying to convert i'm trying to see if i can convert some of my investigative
#
stories or our stories into documentaries books scripted series films etc we have announced a
#
feature film last week called phantom hospital which is where the malayalam director Mahesh
#
nairan is making his bollywood entry and which i am co-producing with tusk tales which is founded
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by prithi sahani she's the producer of talwar razi etc i do have some projects with vikram
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motwane and andrakrishap etc the idea is to see uh whether i can we can find partners who would
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want to adopt edgy real life investigative stories but one thing which i'm with good happening is
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that at the peak of the content revolution that is sweeping the world there is a huge demand
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for real life edgy stories from anarchos to uh when they see us to chernobyl is all real life
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story so that's where i'm trying to place my journalism and see if i can sell but the given
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the chilling censorship that is sweeping india i find i'm finding a lot of resistance but that's
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okay that's part of life to the second part of the question which is about you what you said about
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the the elite upper caste hindus especially see if you let the monster grow they doesn't it doesn't
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have any religion monster has no religion no differentiators they will come for you
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they will come for you in the form of income tax notices they will come for you in the form of
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police bribes they will come for you in the form of dirty roads they will come for you in the form
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of flooded cities they will come for you in the form of pollution then they will come they will
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get you if you quietly sit back and think that this will all wash away because the police is
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anti-muslim no because the state is anti-muslim no they're getting you do you know at least a
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part of the pollution that we are breathing air pollution this country is contributed by
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the poor quality of coal that a group of corrupt corporates have imported into india
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do you know that you are paying extra charge for electricity because they have overbilled for the
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power generation equipments so at every turn of your life you are already a victim of this
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nepotic state this corrupt state and and the security establishment so you have no option
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you have no option either you speak up stand up together we don't know we can we will debate we
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can disagree you can say that i am too sympathetic towards muslims i am too naive you can say
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anything to me but let's debate rationally intelligently let us not be afraid let us not
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be so afraid that we will start playing video game visuals as tv news let us not be so afraid
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that we will start carrying and discussing fake whatsapp forwards as truth let's not be so afraid
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that we snatch away the dreams of our children we we intimidate our children to sleep not letting
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them dream and and those have no religions yeah very wise words i mean i've always said that
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india's core problem is a predatory state that our founders resigned and that predatory state
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has already predated upon us and is doing so as we kind of are not even aware you know the scene
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and the unseen right there josey i'm just filled with even more admiration for you after chatting
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with you and reading the silent coup which is such a wonderful book so so thank you so
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much for your time and your insights and take care boss thank you omit thank you so much all the very
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best to you if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to your nearest bookstore
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online or offline and pick up josey joseph's excellent book the silent coup a history of india's
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deep state you can follow josey on twitter and josey joseph kj that's one word and you can follow
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me at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene
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at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the
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unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go over to scene
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unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive
