It would be academically shallow and analytically incomplete if one were to blame only Indira Gandhi for the Emergency, or Narendra Modi for the present and dramatic decline in India’s democratic standards or, indeed, a Western conspiracy to downgrade India’s ranking as a free country. Throughout history, men and women who have been blinded by their pursuit of power have been not the exceptions but rather the norm. Occasionally, some of them benefit from the cracks in a society, latch on to emotional voids, deploy massive resources, build an aura and rise to power. They then proceed to destroy institutions built and nurtured over decades.


However, in mature democracies, such leaders are stopped in their tracks by robust institutions capable of the administration of justice. It is when democratic institutions give up their singleminded pursuit of justice that such men and women walk straight into the hallowed portals of a nation. India has been witnessing that reality for decades now. Rioters, murders, cheats, rapists are all climbing the ladder of power in this democracy.


Indian democracy is at a crossroads today. Decades of repeated abuse have eroded much of the professional aura of the security establishment and permanent executive, and reduced these institutions to mere intimidatory arms of the political executive. Except in the rhetoric of the ruling elite, India no longer feels like a democracy. The contract of trust between citizens and law enforcers is permanently broken. In most parts, the Indian society is adrift in lawless waters.


This is a book about the gravest threat to the Indian state. It is, ultimately, an incomplete documentation of the vicious attack on the world’s largest democracy by those who are duty-bound to protect it. This is the saga of the brownshirts who terrorise the sweaty masses who pay for them; these are the stories of those who wrap our ghettos in the silence of graveyards and snatch the dreams and voices of the next generation.


Corrective measures are urgently needed if future generations are to know what it means to live in a democratic state.