This is the review of the book in The Hindu today

India and Pakistan are both democracies in form, if not necessarily in substance. If India enjoys a higher status as a democracy, it’s partly because Pakistan’s all-powerful army is able to undermine democratic institutions at will. But you don’t need the military to subvert a democracy. It can also be done through the non-military arm of the security establishment. These include the police, intelligence agencies, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the National Investigation Agency, the Anti-Terrorist Squad, and a multitude of other organisations that, although not an integral part of the ‘security establishment’, do share its capacity to inflict pain, such as the Enforcement Directorate, the Income Tax department, and so on.

Fake world 

In his previous book, A Feast of Vultures, Josy Joseph, an award-winning investigating journalist, documented how corruption has hollowed out India’s governance structures. His latest, The Silent Coup, dwells on the degeneration of the security establishment, which, in his telling, has been completely captured by the political executive. “This book,” Joseph writes, “is an incomplete documentation of the vicious attack on the world’s largest democracy by those who are duty-bound to protect it.”

Joseph’s canvas is vast – from the Mumbai train blasts and the 26/11 terror attack to the Kashmir insurgency, turmoil in the Northeast, the Indian Peace-Keeping Force’s debacles in Sri Lanka, and the ‘Gujarat model’ of the war on terror whose central tenet seems to be the perpetual rediscovery of plots to assassinate Narendra Modi. Joseph narrates the story of a young officer from a Military Intelligence (MI) unit who, in August 2015, cooked up an assassination threat to Modi that was subsequently “shown up as a phoney operation.”

So, what prompted the concoction of a fake terror plot? Joseph writes, “…there was no indication that what the young major in the MI unit did was part of any larger conspiracy, nor that there was any political will behind it. However, he was latching on to a powerful new narrative: that the regime’s image and popularity is linked to its tough stand on terrorism.”

https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/the-silent-coup-a-history-of-indias-deep-state-review-when-the-security-establishment-serves-the-executive/article36513879.ece/amp/?__twitter_impression=true