The Silent Coup by Josy Joseph

 Finally the much awaited "The Silent Coup" by Josy Joseph is here and is the 86th of 2021.  Just like one of my favorite and his previous, "The Feast of Vultures" , this too is in two parts and attempts to show - through real-life examples, characters and data - how a small set of elites, using the legitimate arms of the state  can destabilize a large democracy. Without military or Foreign invasion.  With willing slaves and their masters.

The US was selfish, Pakistan was deadly and India was unprofessional. Indian's suffered. US intelligence agencies did not reveal everything they knew about the attack plan, Pakistan's flourishing terror factory, planned the attacks and unprofessionalism of the Indian security establishment that brought terror raids to the country's shore. 

Though named Mumbai and the book covers major attacks in Mumbai, it do cover also the Gujarat and the Godhra, Malegaon, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi among others. 

Daood Sayed Gilani/David Coleman Headley masterminded the 26th Nov. 2008 Mumbai attack, a decade after the Kandahar hijack. It turns out that the security establishment has not improved, nor learned the lessons. Many lost lives. With Hemant Karkare's death new wave of Islamophobia was sweeping through the country.

Innocents like Wahid were tortured, for the acts by Sadiq who carried out the 2006 train blast. Sadiq in prison often spoke of his trajectory from nationalism to terrorism. C.A.M Basher was the first SIMI president from Kerala to go to Pakistan for training, he is probably operating form Saudi Arabia and may have partially funded the IM operations. 

Since Independence India has struggled with insurgencies and terror.  Part 1 is the story of Wahid.

“No one says anything when unconscious, you will speak only when you are conscious,’ Malini told him. Then, she switched pace. ‘Who did the blasts?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who is the SIMI president?’

‘Pratibha Patil.’ Wahid thought she was asking him who the Indian president was.”

Pat came a slap. ‘Who is the SIMI president?’ Malini raised her voice.

This time Wahid did not have an answer. She took out a tweezer, gripped one of his ears with it and pulled. She asked again: ‘Who is the SIMI president?’

Wahid was silent.

‘Say, Dr Shahid Badar Falahi.’

Wahid repeated after her, like an obedient student following the instructions of a tough teacher.

Malini was now warming up. She asked about the bomb blasts. ‘How many people came and stayed with you?’

Wahid said, no one.

She asked him to say that four people stayed with him.

Wahid was silent.

‘What comes after three?’ she asked.

Wahid replied, four.

‘Did Pakistanis stay in your house?’ Malini asked.

Wahid said no.

The next question was, name India’s neighbouring countries.

Wahid started saying, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and so on.

Throughout the narco test, a senior police officer from the ATS stood next to Malini, instructing her on what to ask him, and then prompting the answers expected.”

..........In the murder case of Sister Abhaya in Kerala, in which two priests and a nun were accused, the court received a doctored CD of the narco tests that had been prepared by Malini. A Kerala High Court judge said that the editing was ‘clearly visible to the naked eye and to find out the evident editing even an expert may not be necessary’. So crudely was it done. Yet, this middle-rung official of a regional forensic lab was one of the most decisive players in some of the biggest terrorist cases in India: the Mumbai train blasts, the Malegaon blasts and the terrorist bombings in Hyderabad, among other cases.”

The impact of Godhra and the 2002 riots in Gujarat that followed continues to reverberate, not just in the state but all of India. What was said in official circles in hushed tones was recorded in the report of a Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal, headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, a man whom Modi called an ‘icon in Indian public life’ and ‘an inspiration to all of us’. The eight-member tribunal said:

It was the chief minister who decided that the charred, unidentifiable dead bodies be taken from Godhra to Ahmedabad in a motor cavalcade. As the cavalcade headed for Ahmedabad, senior members of his party and organisations affiliated to it shouted slogans and incited mobs to retaliate. The CM’s role in condoning this behaviour, and in using official machinery to propagate the unsubstantiated view that the Godhra tragedy was a sinister conspiracy, is condemnable. Thus, it was the chief minister who was primarily responsible for the spread of violence, post-Godhra, in the rest of Gujarat.”

The central idea of his book, is that India is in the hold of the “Deep State”, Josy has explained this by citing the “actual Gujarat Model” that Narendra Modi implemented nationally after taking power in New Delhi. “Those officers who are willing to serve the causes of their political masters have great careers," he says, explaining the model. He points out, by way of an example, how the police officials who investigated the Godhra train fire and subsequent anti-Muslim carnage in Modi’s Gujarat went on to have national careers.

Commenting on how the security and intelligence agencies have been left to essentially operate with impunity, he says, “Across India you will find a lot of Muslims who were police informants and ended up being framed as terrorists.”  They are disposable people, you just use them. America’s FBI has employed the same ploy of driving vulnerable Muslims to hatch “terror plots” and arresting them. The difference is, in the case of the FBI or British intelligence, they would entice you but they wouldn't let you do the actual act. In a country like India, they would let you go all the way. That’s why,  there are question marks about most terrorist attacks in India. End goal is to get acclaim and rewards sad and dangerous fact is that there is a pattern.

Part 2 has 7 separate tales. 

By April 2011, activist Anna Hazare and his supporters began a high-profile protest in Delhi that brought thousands across India on to the streets. Candle-light marches, heated debates and screaming headlines all called for a corruption free India, The most assuring aspect of it all was the sudden professionalism visible across the investigation agencies. Providing them with support and cover was a very determined supreme court. But it was all a chimera. Underneath the bubbling enthusiasm of a maturing democracy, a dangerous politics was gathering strength.

Desperate phone calls and odd requests are part of a reporter’s life. Even by those standards, the call I received in early 2010 was bizarre. A reputed doctor from Kochi told me what his family and several others spread across India had been facing in the recent past—events that, at the peril of using a cliché, I can only call Kafkaesque. My friend Manoj Das, then editor of the Times of India in Kerala, had asked him to speak to me.

In Kochi, this doctor, his wife, also a doctor, and his mother-in-law were facing imminent arrest by the Punjab police, a contingent of which had flown down to the seaside city. Accompanying them was a PR blitzkrieg, accusing the family of being part of a large criminal conspiracy. The pliant local media in Kerala reported that the well-respected family, including the doctor’s mother-in-law, a retired college professor, were all part of a grand scheme to cheat Jay Polychem, a south Delhi-based firm.

In Mumbai, another Punjab police team took away a migrant from Nepal, who had kept his HIV positive status low-key and was trying to build a normal life. On the outskirts of Delhi, in Faridabad, they arrested a pregnant woman, her husband and brother-in-law.

According to the police, all these people were conspiring to implement a plot devised by an engineer, who was now a petrochemical trader, from the Kochi family, who once worked for Jay Polychem. The doctor who called me was the trader’s brother-in-law.

The nightmarish experiences of these seemingly unrelated people had their origins in Mumbai several years earlier. Samdeep Mohan Varghese joined Reliance Industries in 1994 as a management trainee and rose through the ranks. In about a decade, he had become the head of a section in the petrochemicals division. Sam regularly met with the buyers of their products. Among these clients were two brothers from Delhi—Sandeep and Satinder Madhok—whom he met for the first time in 1997. ‘They were pleasant, charming actually,’ Sam recalled. He would meet them occasionally at industrial get-togethers in India and abroad. In 2000, the brothers told Sam that they planned to aggressively expand the petrochemical business via Delhi, Singapore and Houston. They offered him a position in their company as head of a division. Sam was not interested. However, his situation in Reliance soon changed. In a reshuffle, he was moved to the office of the executive director, where there was much more power but the work was too bureaucratic for Sam’s liking. Meanwhile, the Madhoks were relentlessly wooing him. In 2002, Sam accepted their offer. The move came with a salary hike of almost 300 per cent, and the option to work out of Houston or Singapore.

Sam moved to Delhi, and began operating out of the Defence Colony headquarters of Jay Polychem. The Madhoks were keen to impress and win him over. They told him about their political connections—the younger scion of a Punjab political family was a regular at their office, they were particularly close to a powerful woman politician of Uttar Pradesh, they were also in the charmed circles of the members of other parties. As Sam settled into his new job, he began to realise how the Madhok business worked: there was not enough trading, and a lot of bags filled with cash moved in and out of the office. There were secure locations in the office for storing, counting and sorting cash. Sam was focused on starting the Houston office, and kept pestering the Madhoks about it. By August 2008, he had landed in Houston on a business visa. The work visa, the Madhoks told him, would come later. It was an immensely frustrating time—he did not have the proper documents nor did money come in on time. However, Sam carried on, and began interviewing potential candidates to join the Houston office. But then the global recession of 2008 struck. The Madhoks told him to stall the expansion plans and shift to the Singapore office. There, Sam felt more confident, because a well-respected industry name from Shell joined too, as did his former boss from Reliance. However, the Singapore facade collapsed before long.

‘Where it actually started going wrong was when they were looking for trade finance lines [to facilitate international trade] from different banks. I had a lot of friends in the banking sector in Singapore, so they wanted me to make fake presentations. They wanted me to exaggerate their trade volume by ten times, from a few hundred million dollar turnover to a few billions. I refused,’ Sam said. Things went downhill pretty quickly from there. Without a work visa, no proper salary and increasing friction with the management, Sam had enough. He hired a lawyer, who said he should resign from the company, so that they could sue for damages. Within days of the legal notice, Sam had his first nasty surprise. A police notice from Jalandhar arrived, asking him to appear for questioning in Punjab, because he had allegedly cheated the company.

The battle lines were drawn. Sam could not go back. Neither could the Madhoks. For both parties, the stakes could not have been higher.

Sam wrote a detailed complaint in November 2009 to the ED and the DRI. He also filed a complaint with the Singapore authorities.

Within days of his complaint, the company stepped up its response. On 30 November 2009, it filed a complaint with the Rajpura police station in Punjab against Sam and several others for publishing defamatory information about the company on a website they had created. The website had been registered only nine days earlier. By February 2010, an FIR had been filed.

A team of Punjab police personnel flew down to Kochi on tickets bought by Jay Polychem, as if they were goons on hire. Sam’s mother went to the Kerala High Court against the arrest, and it said the allegations were very vague in nature. A few days later, the policemen picked up the Nepali man from Mumbai. He had worked as a household help with Sam when he was with the Reliance group. The man was taken to Punjab, and tortured at the Rajpura police station for information on where Sam was hiding. Overseeing the interrogation was Sandeep Madhok, one of the Jay Polychem brothers.

In Faridabad, a former neighbour of the Madhoks, who now worked for them, began facing an ordeal of his own. Amardeep had protested when he realised that some papers he had signed without reading were actually complaints against Sam. When Sam was in the Delhi office, he had been a kind boss who had even sponsored Amardeep’s honeymoon to Kerala. The man resigned from the company in protest, but the ordeal was just beginning. One day, he was summoned to the company, and Sandeep Madhok and his brother beat him up with a belt, asking him to stand by their complaint against Sam. He refused. A few days later, a posse of Punjab police landed up at Amardeep’s house, and told him that there was a case against not just him, but also his wife, sister and brother-in-law. He was taken to Punjab, and tortured at the Rajpura police station. Overseeing the torture session, once again, was Sandeep Madhok.

Supervising the police operation was the then DIG of Patiala range, S.K. Asthana. As I began to piece together the police excesses for the Times of India, I called Asthana. ‘I don’t care about what you write in your paper,’ he told me nonchalantly. In fact, he had a suggestion for me: ask Sam to come to Punjab and cooperate with the police. Asthana has in the past been accused of custodial death, was pulled up by the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and accused by the Election Commission of bias and transferred out.

It was surprising that the Madhoks, who were based in Delhi, should go to Punjab to file cases against Sam and the others. When I asked him about it, Sandeep Madhok, accompanied by a very aggressive and unruly lawyer, told me that one of the directors noticed the website while he was in Punjab. So an instant complaint was filed there. You are close to a powerful political family in Punjab, is that why you filed the complaint there, I asked. I got no response.

Thanks to their proximity to the powerful political family, the Madhoks had powerful access to the might of the state police force. The aggressive fight against the Sikh militancy had left a deep impression on the Punjab police. The militancy had been put down, but the unruly side of the police was still very active and was not held to account. Jay Polychem just hired that side of the Punjab police.

The Kashmir stories the 1990, in details, on how the announcement was made and so many had to flee, brought tears to eyes. Kapil Mishra and the Delhi Riots is where the book ends. 

It was amazing to listen to the author live during the Banglore literary fest:

Was it a natural follow up?

First emergence of middlemen and this time the security system.

Reporter covering security issues, emergency period sow the exploitation by the political master.

Who did the master bidding, never got punished. It stuck that the template, you do what you want, save your political master and you will be safe. That template was used and is being used even now which is not only effecting liberty, but also challenging the emergence of a free market and society based on merit.

Intelligence and security agency, are underrepresented, and are at disadvantage, security is at the mercy of the informants. Industry of Informants is a multimillion dollar industry and creating fake information and settling information. There is no official auditable information. This industry effects security industry as well. It is a semi criminal industry. Local thief and pickpockets, are mostly them.

1987 Kashmir, collapse of Afghanistan, Article 370 – Terrorism has been used by every religion, We are in for blunders now.

Agencies frame false narratives. Nobody is accountable.

Absurd to blame Modi, as it is copied.

Absurd to say terrorism is Islamic.

1)     Mumbai and attacks, crime story – If you don’t know what is going wrong, people don’t have closer for their grief, we still don’t know who the real terrorist was. Entrepreneurs are effected, but they are being silenced by security.

2)     Survey small time news operation, when there are big scams?

Role of media, are they not guilty of trusting their sources too much? How the frenzy of terrorist attack has contaminated our media. Saying this is secret and the editors fall for it. They publish absolute rubbish. They have roles as much as terrorist.

What next? Stock market?

Complex investigation story. No pressure of 350 pages delivery.

Birth of Indian democracy – to be celebrated. Should not be lost to misinterpretation.