Major General (retd.) Gagan Deep Bakshi is an Indian Army veteran who served in Jammu & Kashmir Rifles. Bakshi has authored over two dozen books and taught at Indian Military Academy, Dehradun, the prestigious Defence Services Staff College, Wellington, Tamil Nadu, and National Defence College, Delhi, for two years before retiring in 2008.

His prominence and popularity, however, is not merely due to his Military credentials but mainly because of his ubiquitous presence on Indian prime-time news channels where he performs pure theatrics studded with routine emotional outbursts and cries, high-pitched screams, literal profanities, jingoism, curses, and whatnot.

He often stoops to calling names and sometimes resorts to profanities to counter his co-panelists on TV debates. From “kuttey, neech aadmi, badtameez, vaahiyaad to madarch***”, are the staple cuss words of an enraged Bakshi.

This war veteran and decorated Indian army officer is an avowed Hindu nationalist and thus reveres far-right Hindu personalities and helps Hindu extremist organizations like Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in the latter’s endeavor to legitimize and mainstream the Hindu supremacist ideology in the Country.

“India has faced barbaric attacks from Muslims. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar dreamed the formation of ‘Akhand Bharat’ and the victory of BJP led by Narendra Modi has laid the foundation of Akhand Bharat”, said Major General G D Bakshi at an event in 2019.

His lecture at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ yearly edition of extramural lectures encapsulates his ideology and mindset. He said sycophantically that India got real independence when Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014. Glorifying nuclear weaponry and shouting in an irrational jingoistic tone, he said, “In our generation, we split Pakistan into 2. Your generation should split into 4. Only then we can live in peace!’.

He went on declare Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent freedom struggle a “nonsense.”

His sadistic fantasy came to the fore when he celebrated the incident in which a Kashmiri Muslim man was tied to an Indian Army jeep by an army officer and was paraded around many villages. Bakshi praised and said that the man who created the ‘out of the box’ idea should be awarded.

For Bakshi, the distinction between a good and bad Muslim is clear — the faultline balancing on allegiance to Bharat Mata. Muslims in the Azad Hind Sena and Muslims who denounce the Mughal period are good Indians, but the rest aren’t Indian at all.