Why are the police being so brutally violent with the young, unarmed protestors and journalists who are out to join the protests in New Delhi? This is now the most devastating reality no less shocking than the main occasion of the protest – the great cloud hanging over our electoral democracy. The sheer physical excess of the savagery has flooded our senses and our social media feeds: a young woman caged in a bus, out of breath, telling us how male and female protestors have been separated, with male cops assaulting female protestors, tearing their clothes; protestors being dragged across the ground; protestors screaming from caged vans, peaceful demonstrators, including young college students detained without any legal ground. By now we know that this regime will go any length to keep its throne, but the question that now stares at us is this: are all the policemen and women so deeply implicated in this administration and ideology that scarcely any of them have shown any resistance to and deviation from this brutal pogrom? Were badges and uniforms only handed out to handpicked ideologues? Is that even possible? How are they able to ignore the sheer physical brutality of their own actions – of beating up young men and women, some of them minors? Police personnel shove protesters in to a bus. Photo: PTI.Physical repression is unleashed at the failure of ideological control. As many have said, the violence of this repression reveals the regime’s great fear. When ideological indoctrination is poured through family, religion, and school, it becomes the long-term formula for soft-power domination. Louis Althusser had said this several decades ago. It is only when people refuse to buy into the ideology that repressive state apparatuses of violence need to kick in – police, jail, the military. Speaking of colonial domination, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote: “The night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.” The regime in India has done all of this for the last dozen years. But mythical muscular bow-and-arrow strutting heroes are now failing to persuade the millions ravaged by a destructive economy that has not hesitated to extract its pound of corrupt flesh from sacred temples; blatant and invasive cuts to textbooks and syllabi have failed to shape an education that wins continued support from youth who stare at jobless futures. Even the home, powerful incubators of dominant ideology for many, has turned once the police batons started to come down on students gathered to rally against the corruption that blew away their education. What is left now but the sheer physicality of repression?Intriguingly, the current face-off started as key players dissented – the two members of the Election Commission who have recorded their disagreements with the Chief Election Commissioner. We hear there was great pressure on the dissenters to retract and proclaim a forged unity, and that the pressure didn’t yield. What makes the foot soldiers follow the machinery when cracks start to appear at the top? Of course, nobody expected a 1857-style rebellion in uniform. The question is about the extent of this violence orchestrated with steely determination. How did badges and uniforms make the men and women of our country so cruelly insensitive? Lindy England, an American woman who served during the US-Iraq war, drew attention with her great sadistic delight at torturing war prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The woman in uniform in Delhi have done well on that front even as various male methods of violating women protestors have continued unabated. All around, it’s been a horror show.To do a job is, and should be, the first instinct of anybody who holds one. Add to that the heavy momentum of daily living, and the need to put roti on the tawa. For men and women in uniform, the calling may feel weightier. But the word ‘unform’ automatically moulds uniformity. One video stood out for me: a group of cops formed a well-coordinated ring to drag a woman journalist into a detaining bus – a lone woman. Beyond the cruelty of that image of one versus many, what struck me was the image of teamwork – not necessarily one perfectly synchronized, but still unmistakably a team that looked like a pack of predators in the fatal dance of going after a single, vulnerable prey.Police personnel detain people in New Delhi, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.Images of British police beating up freedom fighters have been invoked to describe the ongoing practice of violence, detention, and imprisonment. In the eyes of the postcolonial nation, the brown policemen of British administration are seen as traitors to the nationalist cause, attacking those staking their lives for it. How could these bootlickers of the British beat up their fellow Indians? There too, the momentum and inertia of duty and its material trappings hold individuals down and keep them from political goals that appear beyond the range of their daily survival. But these protests are happening in independent India, though in a nation, one might say, where freedom and democracy have been pushed truly to the margins. But there are still Indians on both sides of the divide. Is this where the similarities end? When the police see the protestors, do they see people like themselves?This is where the great ironies of education and (un)employment in our country builds a stark divide. For the most part, the protestors are a population who have either acquired higher education or are on the way to do so. The farm hands and workers who have joined them are still a minority. But this is an educated population which faces a dark future. Where are the jobs for all this education? And now with examinations going awry, even the prospects of their higher education are disappearing in harsh daylight. The vast majority of police constables have no higher education, but they hold the holy grail, a government job. To put it brutally, both groups have something the other doesn’t – an education, a government job. Who is in a better position? Traditionally, it would have been easy to see privilege lie with the better educated, few of whom would care for the job of a police constable. But this is a stark and unforgiving nationscape, where Ph.D. holders drive Ubers and qualified professionals apply for government jobs of menial labour; where a government job of any kind comes with all the grace of a lottery ticket given the terrifying game of numbers between seat and aspirant. Do the protestors reveal the unemployed circle from which the constables and sub-inspectors see themselves as having narrowly escaped? Are they the darkness that could have been their future? But a darkness with a posture, with leaders who have postgraduate degrees and read Ambedkar? Perhaps in this climate more than ever, it is easy for a uniformed army to wield the baton on the young who are anything but uniform, gathering up voices from the margin that threaten the national uniformity dreamt by the white shirts and khaki shorts. The uniform owes its allegiance to the government far more than it does in ordinary times. We still can’t fathom how that allegiance leads to such savagery. Only the image of the cops in a ring can tell us that story. Looking at their violent energy, the expressions on their faces, it is impossible to doubt the cops’ personal, bodily involvement. And yet at a macro level, they see themselves as just following orders, as small cogs in a colossal wheel. Doubtless there are punishments for not doing so, and rewards for following orders. But the truly ominous moment arrives when the foot soldiers in a system of violent persecution lose their own sense of agency and responsibility and see themselves as “just following orders.”Police personnel detain a woman at Connaught Place, in New Delhi, Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.In a large system, the agency of a minor functionary can feel dispersed widely enough for none of them to actually feel responsible. But together, it is the actions of such minor functionaries that make persecution possible. This is what the philosopher Aakash Singh Rathore has recently called the agentic state. Using the term coined by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, Rathore describes the agentic state as “the psychological mode in which a person stops experiencing themselves as the author of their actions and instead sees themselves as an instrument for someone else’s will.” Decades of psychological experiments involving (fake) torture, (simulated) prisons and sometimes simply the pressure to respond as a conformist, conducted by academics such as Stanley Milgram, Philip Zombardo, and Solomon Ash have now scientifically established the reality of the agentic state, whose most infamous model remains Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic architect of the holocaust, for whom sending millions to the gas chamber was simply the banality of paperwork and filing cabinets.The chilling title of Aakash Singh Rathore’s book is Will AI Murder Us All? Obviously, for AI agents, the agentic state is the default situation. Their passionless destruction of life is already a reality with drone airfare. We live in a world where totalitarian regimes have managed to turn a mass of poor, excluded people into drone warriors. The visceral sense of grabbing a human being, tearing their clothes, dragging them across the streets, does nothing to take away from their large sense of lacking agency in the very decision to brutally attack fellow citizens in a free country. But that is how we know that the country is not free, not yet. Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial.