It looks like incoherent chaos. The prime minister in a benevolent mode, forgiving the very young people that his ecosystem continues to hunt. The same day, injured policemen are paraded before cameras. A girl is booked for abusing the prime minister. An army of friendly influencers descends on Gen Z to lecture them about their manners. And the police, meanwhile, cannot quite explain how a truck laden with stones travelled from their own custody to the edge of a protest.But it is not chaos. It is choreography. This is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) method at its most refined. Every element performs a distinct function for a distinct audience. In the process, unleashing another cycle of hate, intimidation, and ridicule at the young who protested, delegitimising the protest, while ostensibly posing to appeal for harmony.The disdain for Parliament and democracy is written large in the prime minister’s appeal, who refuses to address Parliament and talks on Instagram. No explanation, no remorse, no questions, just patriarchal patronage. No accountability, no acknowledgement of anything gone wrong, just an assessment that propaganda tools have changed, moved on to Instagram. For him, Instagram was the problem, Instagram is the solution!The agitation that sat for over a month at Jantar Mantar, the protests that the Congress youth wing and student organisation carried to scores of cities across two months, was absolutely peaceful. The only day of violence was on the day the police cracked down. Not before that. Not after that.And it is that single day, that is now being held up as the true face of the protest. A month of restraint is erased; an afternoon of confrontation is promoted to the headline.Regardless of who actually threw the first stone, who was in disguise, and who instructed them, both the government and, curiously, some protestors like Wangchuk reached for the same phrase: national security threat. And that preface is now being used to pit police families against young protestors.BJP is not merely deflecting blameIt may be noted that there is yet no investigation into the indiscriminate use of weapons on protesters. No inquiry into how a stone-laden truck and a van slipped out of police custody and materialised at the protest site, ready-made props for a narrative of citizen savagery. No action against the officers in whose custody those vehicles sat. No questions about who authorised the deployment of pellet guns in Delhi, or the AK 47s in Bihar. The The Modi-Shah government is remarkably incurious. It is not at all concerned with any such criminal irregularities.BJP is not merely deflecting blame; it is busy drawing another hate-filled dividing line in society. Families of police are being pitted against citizens who protested. A new demarcation line is being drawn, where the police community is separated from the rest of society. Police is no more the protector; police is the victim. A profession is being quietly severed from the public it serves and handed a grievance against it.Notice what this does to the police themselves. An officer’s injury in the line of duty was once a matter of professional hazard and, yes, of pride too, the risk a uniform accepts. It is now repackaged as emotional evidence in a political trial, proof of assault by hostile citizens. The pride of sacrifice is being reduced to lament and a call for pity. That is no honour. It is a demotion dressed as a tribute.The state under the BJP has discovered a bold new principle of jurisprudence: that a pellet gun and a slipper are the same weapon, provided the slipper is thrown at the government. That a nail-driven lathi unleashed on a protesting citizen is somehow a lesser violence, while the protester who flinches or fights back is the aggressor.We are asked to weigh the injury of the man holding the tear-gas gun against the injury of the boy he was aiming it at, and to find them, somehow, morally identical. This is called balance. In every other context it is called changing the subject.Apparently, a narrative is being set by BJP that the difference between the armed and the unarmed is a technicality, which only ungrateful citizens keep raising.The same establishment that could not spare its men and women a name badge or a uniform is now outraged that the crowd failed to recognise them. One does admire the ambition of expecting protestors to identify police men and women in civil clothes.And there is no consternation or objection by aggrieved police families that their men and women in duty were asked to dress up in civil clothes and posted anonymously. This effectively took away the the protection of law available to police forces. They were on duty as common individuals. Protection of law is available to police only when he or she is in uniform and with name badge. Law is clear, any police man or women who resorts to violence for crowd control in civil dress does not get the protection of section 132 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), earlier Indian Penal Code (IPC) 353.After having pushed policemen into conspiratorial role and after stripping them off the legal privilege in civil dress, an emotional outrage is being manufactured against the protestors. Constitutional rights of protesters be damned.Having sent policemen and women into a crowd dressed as the crowd, BJP presents their injuries as proof of the crowd’s savagery, a remarkable feat of first removing the evidence and then lamenting there is none.The kindly face on the screenWhich brings us, finally, to the performance that ties the whole day together – the prime minister on Instagram, forgiving the misled youth.Read the message beneath the magnanimity. To forgive is to presume guilt; the reel quietly converts protesting students into penitents who require the PM’s mercy. It grants him the moral high ground he could not win by argument. He and his home minister have been inconspicuously absent from the floors of Parliament. Even when the Vande Mataram bill was discussed, brought in to emotionally charge and divert public attention; and when Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, 2026 was passed as a panacea to the paper leak menace, Modi-Shah skipped the debates. They didn’t intervene at all. Not because they had nothing to say. But because they had no courage to face questions and be accountable.The Instagram message is just an escape. A design to appear magnanimous, when the demand is to be answerable.Meanwhile, off-camera, the machinery grinds on. Reels documenting the protest vanishing from feeds, journalists’ posts throttled, a woman booked for words. The grandstanding about controlling abuse runs cover for the controlling of dissent. The velvet glove is on the screen; the fist is everywhere else.None of this is improvised. It is the same recipe served each time criticism gathers strength: unleash the ecosystem to intimidate and ridicule, delegitimise the protest as a threat to the nation, cleave society into camps that can be turned against each other and then have the leader float serenely above it all, the picture of concerned statesmanship. Fear is manufactured wholesale; care is retailed by the reel.A generation asked why its examinations were for sale and why its futures were shrinking. The answer it received was a booking, a crackdown, a phantom truck, an army of trolls, and a smiling video of forgiveness. The republic should not mistake the smile for the substance. A government that punishes you all week and pardons you on Friday has not shown you mercy. It has shown you the machine it owns.Gurdeep Singh Sappal is Permanent Invitee, Congress Working Committee.