Burden of Truth

What the voices of India’s political prisoners say about freedom. An extract

Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia

In a statement of unusual candour, retired Major General Rajan Kochhar said, ‘It would be premature right now to equate a civil society in the same category as terror groups and insurgents. We should all be alarmed by Kochhar’s argument that the equation between civil society and terror groups is only ‘premature’ now not inconceivable.

This statement is not the isolated musing of an ultraconservative retired army officer. Rather, it follows quite closely the path marked by no less than the National Security Advisor (NSA) of India, Ajit Doval.

In a November 2021 address to the probationary officers at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy in Hyderabad, Doval had declared: ‘People are most important. The new frontiers of war—what we call the fourth-generation warfare—is the civil society.’ As military wars are too uncertain and costly or no longer effective, civil society is the new battleground as it ‘can be subverted, divided, and can be manipulated, to hurt the interest of the nation.’

Fourth-generation warfare is defined as a kind of conflict where the lines between war and politics, civilians and combatants blur and where non-state actors are no longer proxies, but the main threat to the very existence of a country. In Doval’s speech, the language of war openly enters the public domain and defines the terms of the debate about political opposition and critical dissent. Civil society—which is meant to be the very soul of a functioning democracy—thus turns into a potential enemy the state, into a threatening entity ready to hurt its interests, into a menace that needs to be eradicated.

As words make worlds, the gap between intentions and deeds shrinks. The state is no longer culpable of killing dissent; it is, on the contrary, applauded for giving utmost priority to national security. As we mentioned in the introduction, the Supreme Court in 2016 refused to admit a public interest litigation that called for greater scrutiny of the activities of India’s intelligence agencies and the manner in which they were using the funding granted to them. This decision provided sanction to the fact that India is the only democracy in the world where intelligence agencies whose task is supposedly the preservation of national security, hence something that is of public interest—are not accountable to anyone, neither to th