Dear reader, This past week, in several states, protests against the Agnipath scheme for recruitment of short-term contracted soldiers took a violent turn. There can be no justification for the arson and vandalism. And yet, it would be a mistake for the government to use this as a cover to go back to its now familiar playbook whenever its big moves, announced suddenly, without preparing the ground for them, meet with eruptions of popular discontent. In the aftermath of Agnipath, the big question is: Will it listen to the protesters, talk to them, instead of, as it has done before, labelling them? As our editorial pointed out, the protests against Agnipath frame a deepening crisis - the fact that crores of unemployed young seek a secure future only in the sarkari naukri speaks of a pervasive sense of hopelessness about the jobs market, the absence of opportunities and the lack of skills. At the same time, by all accounts, the institution of the armed forces needs radical restructuring and reform. It needs to bring down the salary-pension burden - the government, however, is underplaying this compulsion while talking up the goal of a more youthful, more technologically adept force - and find resources for the long-delayed modernisation that will prepare it for future battles. In the coming days, then, this will be the government's foremost challenge - to explain why it had to cover the distance from "One Rank One Pension", promised in 2013 and implemented in 2015, to what some are calling "No Rank No Pension" in 2022. Going by its past record, however, and even though it has made some accommodations, like the one-time maximum age relaxation from 21 years to 23, the government may not get down to the task of explaining and persuading. It may, as it did for the most part, when faced with a popular agitation against the three farm laws, treat the protests as a mere law and order problem, call them "anti-national" and other names. It may blame it all on "usual suspects" in the Opposition or among those who have ostensibly still not reconciled to the several electoral victories of the Modi-BJP. Or it may seek fall guys within. In Bihar, even as the young take to the streets in large numbers, the BJP is turning on its ally, JD(U), accusing it of fuelling the unrest. There may be a separate political story there, of sharpening tensions between Nitish Kumar's party and the BJP, partners in government. But painting the Agnipath protests as BJP vs Opposition, or BJP vs JD(U), may be deliberately missing the bigger picture. After all, if the non-BJP parties had either the mobilisation capacity or skill to bring people to the streets, it would have shown up in their electoral tallies, which have been dismal and shrinking. The BJP's real problem over the last many years has been this — even as its convincing electoral victories showcase its spreading base among the People, it continues to wear on its sleeve its intense discomfort with People who Protest. The story, each time, starts with a refusal by the BJP-led government to acknowledge the protesters' agency, and has ended in at least two instances, on land acquisition and the farm laws, with the government bludgeoning forward till it was forced to retreat. Underlying this syndrome is a distrust and a suspicion that also shows up elsewhere - for instance, in key deletions in school textbooks that an ongoing investigation in this paper is capturing. The changes seem designed to highlight a narrative that is state-centric and relegates and marginalises stories of the people's push-back against authority and the powerful. As the series of reports has revealed, protest and social movements in contemporary India - including those spearheaded by Narmada Bachao Andolan, Dalit Panthers and Bharatiya Kisan Union - have been considerably pared down or deleted from the texts, as part of a "rationalisation" exercise by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) six months ago for all subjects. Whatever happens on Agnipath, the BJP will have to find a way of looking the people in the eye, not just when it goes to ask them for their vote, but also in between elections, even and especially when they say they have a problem. Till next week, Vandita | 
