Watching Sonam Wangchuk disappear behind a white sheet, flanked by the relentless energy of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and other activists – and the young people mobilised by their call – one can’t help but wonder: will this unlikely alliance be able to disassemble the Bharatiya Janata Party’s toolkit before the state straitjackets them with ‘anti-national’ or some other choice epithet made specifically for them?Over the past decade, the ruling establishment has perfected a toolkit that does not just break bones, it breaks identities and erases reality. It is an industrial factory that manufactures custom straitjackets for anyone who dares to ask a question of power, while quietly sweeping monumental crises under the rug.Because of this narrative machine, issues that should send shockwaves through the country vanish without a trace.Consider the silent exodus at the Indian Space Research Organisation, where over 100 top scientists have submitted their resignations or applied for voluntary retirement. Knowledge built over decades on critical projects like the Gaganyaan is walking out the door, yet this massive institutional collapse is met with official silence and gagging orders rather than accountability.Consider the horrific tragedy in Rajasthan, where a 12-year-old girl was trafficked and gang-raped by 32 men across multiple hotel rooms over several days. A crime of that unimaginable scale should have rocked the nation’s collective conscience to its core, driving millions into the streets just as the Nirbhaya case once did. Yet, under the toolkit’s strict newsroom control, it produced barely a whisper.And then there is the ongoing, systematic persecution of Muslims, a demographic facing mob lynchings, bulldozer justice tearing through homes, arbitrary disenfranchisement from voter lists, and the constant, echoing threat of detention camps and deportation. Yet ordinary citizens remain too terrified to raise their voice, fully aware that the moment they demand basic constitutional humanity, the toolkit brigade will instantly brand them anti-Hindu.This machinery functions on a precise chronological timeline. Before a grassroots movement can even find its vocabulary, before its leaders can gather to articulate their grief, the toolkit moves in with pre-written obituaries. It converts complex human struggles into sterile, easily digestible threats to national security.In 2016, a few student chants on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University became the raw material for the state’s first mass-produced straitjacket. Through a highly efficient conveyor belt of doctored video clips, hyperventilating news anchors, and coordinated digital storms, young student activists were transformed overnight into the infamous ‘Tukde Tukde Gang’. This moniker was stitched so tightly around them that it stripped away the entire context of the university’s administrative overreach and refusal to tolerate dissent, reducing bright academic minds to cartoon villains in the public imagination. The brilliance of this prototype lay in its permanence; once the public was convinced that these students wanted the physical balkanisation of India, the state could comfortably lock their cell doors under draconian laws while the middle class applauded.If JNU was the BJP’s laboratory for managing student dissent, the 2020 Shaheen Bagh sit-in was where the toolkit was scaled into a full-blown containment strategy against a completely different demographic: grandmothers and mothers defending their constitutional identity. Here were citizens occupying a cold Delhi street, armed only with copies of the Constitution, national flags, and portraits of B.R. Ambedkar. Because the machine could not easily paste a radical student tag onto an eighty-year-old grandmother, it had to retool its factory and weave a different kind of straitjacket. The toolkit systematically reframed the protest through three sharp needles: first, the weaponisation of public inconvenience, turning ordinary commuters into victims by focusing entirely on blocked traffic and delayed ambulances; second, the manufacturing of the foreign hand narrative, painting working-class mothers as paid actors in a sinister, dark-money conspiracy to destabilise the capital; and third, the injection of majoritarian anxiety, stripping the protest of its universal constitutional language.This brings us back to the frail, starving figure of Sonam Wangchuk, the three doughty student activists from AISA – Neha, Manish Kumar and Aameen Amitoj – who ended their 20-day hunger strike on Monday, and the explosive rise of the CJP beside them. The smear factory is in full swing, gears grinding and wheels turning, its assembly lines smoking as the BJP tries frantically to sew a double straitjacket. But the machine is glitching.Wangchuk’s pedigree resists their usual fabric, clogging the needles of the narrative machine. How do you brand a man anti-national when his entire life has been an act of radical, quiet service to India’s icy borders? How do you call an engineer a foreign agent when he designed the literal mud structures keeping Indian soldiers warm in sub-zero temperatures?And then there is the CJP, a Gen Z movement born out of the raw pain of broken futures and leaked exam papers. They bring a weapon to this fight that the state has absolutely no defence against: biting, generational satire. The toolkit was built to crush grim ideologues and furious radicals; it stumbles blindly when facing a generation that proudly names itself after pests because the highest offices called them that, using irony as an impenetrable shield. When Wangchuk’s moral gravitas fuses with the CJP’s irreverent, un-censorable digital warfare, the traditional factory lines break down completely.The state’s ecosystem deployed its ultimate secondary defence: studio talking heads. Paid propagandists migrated from podcast to podcast, channel to channel, lazily attempting to glue new labels onto an unsmearable man and an unfazed youth movement. They looked into their HDTV cameras and called Wangchuk an anarchist while framing the CJP either as misguided agitators, or even foreign agents – trying to reduce a multi-week hunger fast and mass youth awakening into a plot to destabilise public order.Yet the media machinery stalled.Journalists simply could not trick the public into believing that a Magsaysay award winner and thousands of desperate students were anti-national proxies. When the smear campaign failed to take hold, the state was forced to drop its narrative veil and reveal its true face. The deployment of a brutal lathi charge against peaceful marchers is the ultimate admission of failure. A lathi charge is never a show of state strength; it is the clumsy, violent panic of a regime whose psychological toolkit has shattered. When you can no longer control the story, the baton is the only weapon left in the box.While compromised anchors spin frantic narratives in television studios, the reality on the asphalt has already broken free of their containment zones. What happened at Jantar Mantar has grown beyond localised gridlock. It has become catalytic, charting an unstoppable trajectory upward. When tens of thousands of students marched toward Parliament under a blanket internet shutdown, they weren’t just marching for examination reform. A seed has been planted deep in the topsoil of youth consciousness, and it is germinating in the dark.Mehbooba Mufti is leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples’ Democratic Party and a former chief minister of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.