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The machinations of those wielding State power is not surprising at all after the nationwide youth protest has given them the biggest political  scare so far. The standard playbook is out, though it is proving inadequate this time. As usual, Prime Minister Narendra Modi plays the good cop, Amit Shah enacts the bad cop and the RSS boss, Mohan Bhagwat, often intervenes as the benign judge who says all the right things and then lets the status quo prevail. Does this routine sound familiar to you?

Journalists and seasoned political analysts have been deceived time and again by this carefully crafted charade of the Sangh parivar, which has created the most brutal edifice of coercive power seen in the last half century.

The good cop-bad cop routine is critical to preserve Modi’s image. We all know what it looks like: Whenever a big political crisis hits the NDA government, Modi disappears from the scene and becomes incommunicado for some time. The rest of the ecosystem gets busy with elaborate mechanisms to ring fence the prime minister’s image. The most immediate and urgent task is always to protect the prime minister’s image, which is far more important than addressing the larger crisis itself. Whether it is civil war in Manipur, the prolonged farmers’ agitation, Operation Sindoor, Donald Trump imposing the highest tariffs on India or several lakh........

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