Deep State draws on Turkish words — derin devlet — and is commonly used when discussing the politics of Pakistan and Turkey. Some allege the US is part of this cluster as well but with Narendra Modi’s rise, has India joined the set? Prime Minister Modi has been variously compared to Charles de Gaulle and Vladimir Putin but his closest resemblance may be to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey; remember how Erdogan was imprisoned for allegedly inciting religious differences in 1997? Two key individuals in Modi’s team, his national security adviser, Ajit Doval and the newly anointed president of the BJP, Amit Shah, need a much closer scrutiny to establish if a Deep State — a state within a state — exists in India.

Historically, a Deep State is birthed in ultra-nationalism, corporatism, anti-liberalism and an aggressive projection of state interests. This, however, is a very loose definition; Islamists categorise them as secularists, leftists demonise then as anti-worker and liberals castigate them as anti-democratic.

Members of this Deep State come from high level elements within the intelligence community, the armed forces, the academia and retired foreign service officers. Generally this select group thrives in countries with a legacy of military rule and it works clandestinely; labouring tirelessly away from the public eye for the greater glory of their country. Unsung heroes to the insiders but to outsiders, they are dangerous maniacs.

Doval is a highly regarded and much decorated ex-spy chief. He headed India’s Intelligence Bureau for nine months but left prematurely in 2005 and post retirement became the founder director of Vivekananda International Foundation which is perhaps India’s, American Enterprise Institute, the prestigious neo conservative think tank of the US.

He was the principal negotiator during the 1999 Kandahar hijacking, was responsible for the covert operations in Punjab during operation Black Thunder in 1989 and was spectacularly successful in breaking the back of insurgency spawned by the Mizo National Front in the 1980s.

Amit Shah was best known for his role in the alleged fake encounter case in Gujarat — the murder of Ishrat Jahan — until he single-handedly master-minded the BJP’s electoral victory in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the parliamentary elections of 2014. And it is this success that has got him his new job as head of the BJP. Shah is a tactician par excellence and there is a clear method to his success. His mantra is to craft a monolithic Hindu vote-bank primarily to win elections; recall the Muzaffarnagar riots and now the ongoing violence in Moradabad, a precursor to the coming assembly elections in UP. Look more closely to the 2002 violence in Gujarat and how it was used, one can see a pattern; create a fear psychosis so that caste politics is subsumed and make voting against the minority a one-point agenda. Gujarat has been the test-bed for these tactics.

Congress’s pseudo secularism

Cynical and naked use of identity politics did not happen in a vacuum or overnight; the liberal voice has lost faith in the Congress Party, its bastion for long. Indeed it is Congress’s pseudo secularism that has given rise to the BJP. And now Modi has stolen the development story as well with his catchy phrase Sab ka Vikas, Sab ka Sath (Development for all).

Alarmingly, the liberal, the very bulwark, against racist Hindu polemics, seems to have gradually bought into parts of this majoritism. Television anchors give prime time slots to cranks who assert helicopters were in use in ancient India and the mythical river Sarasvati is more important than cleaning up the earthly Ganges. Hindu demagogues spout hyphenated absurdities like “Hindu-Christian” and are serious about renaming India as Hindustan. And yet the support base of the BJP holds firm.

How has it become fashionable to wear a Hindu badge unlike earlier times when being called a liberal, at least in India, was still a badge of honour? Strangely, the poster boys for the new India — the IT gurus, the NRIs, the cutting edge entrepreneurs — are also fellow travellers in this majoritism and ludicrously believe the majority is under threat from its minority. Sadly, the Muslims have done themselves no favour either, they lack forward looking mass leaders and depend on people like Mohammad Azam Khan — who said ‘the peaks of Kargil were conquered not by Hindus but by Muslims’ — or the likes of P.K. Basheer — a member of the local legislature in Kerala —who demands the introduction of Sharia law in Malappuram district, the only Muslim majority district in the state. Aggressive assertions of their identity is keeping pace with those from the Hindu right and it would appear that even the liberal of yesteryears is losing patience with them when they object to singing Vande Mantram [ I praise thee mother] a song with historical and emotional significance to Indians of all persuasions.

The deep state mind set has blossomed against this backdrop. It fanatically believes Muslim sensitivities should perforce be subordinated to the manifest destiny of a Hindu nation. The uniform civil code, neo-federalism, the abrogation of Article 370, the primacy of Hindi over English and the history, culture and language wars that are being fought herald the fact that the old edifice built brick by brick during the Nehruvian era is in shambles. A rising India is in dire need of a new super structure and its foundations must be rooted in Hindu majoritism.

Perversely, education and information technology has only aided and abetted a monolithic version of Hinduism and created this idyllic view that antiquity has all the answers for today’s problems. This is not unique to Hinduism and to India. Education has ironically made people aware of historical grievances that they were blissfully ignorant of earlier.

The Hindu poor couldn’t care less about Mahmoud of Ghazni or the Somnath temple, it is the Hindu middle class-the software engineers, scientists, and lawyers- who spearhead Hindu nationalism. This search for a reinvented national greatness is what gives the Deep State its legitimacy and Doval and Shah may well be its praetorian guards.