Facing popular upheavals

THE state may have succeeded in pushing the protesters back from the streets of the capital on Tuesday night, but consider what it took to make that happen. Even before the crowds had departed, the scale of the lockdown in Punjab was perhaps unprecedented, even compared to the pandemic. Speak with industry owners across the province and listen to the stories of shipments stuck — whether of raw material coming into factories or finished product ready for shipment to the port — and you will get a sense of how far-reaching the lockdown was. The state won the showdown, there Is no doubt about that. But in order to win, they had to literally paralyse the largest province in the country, as well as its industrial heartland. Let’s not bother tallying up the losses the few days of shutdown inflicted on industry. Those are puny by comparison to the long-term losses we are all going to suffer on account of the manifest weakness of the state that the protest exposed.