Agnipath firestorm mirrors farm laws, CAA pushback | Political Pulse News,The Indian Express

Ahead of the Bengal Assembly polls last year, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had promised that the CAA's implementation will be the "first decision of the state cabinet" if the BJP forms the government. Later, he said it would be rolled out after the end of the Covid-19 vaccination drive.

The BJP’s announcement that the party-led Centre’s Agnipath scheme for short-term recruitment of soldiers in armed forces will not be rolled back despite widespread youth protests has a parallel, whose echo might still be ringing in the corridors of power.

In December 2020, when a long winter of discontent was just beginning to set in over Delhi’s borders with thousands of farmers from Punjab and Haryana reaching there in protest against the three contentious farm laws passed by Parliament in September 2020, the BJP dispensation had categorically ruled out any possibility of repealing these laws.

Eleven months later, in November 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the withdrawal of the farm laws, describing it as a decision taken in the “interest of the nation”.

The period stretching from June 2020, when farm laws were first promulgated as ordinances, to their abrupt withdrawal one-and-a-half years later, marked by unprecedented protests and its staunch rejection by the saffron party, exposed the vulnerabilities of a numerically intimidating government in pushing through such reforms with wide-ranging social ramifications.

In the cases of both farm laws as well as the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)-National Register of Citizens (NRC) which is also virtually in limbo, the Opposition-ruled states along with some of the BJP’s own allies mounted a major pushback, which is being mirrored by the Agnipath fallout now with the scheme running into stiff resistance from the BJP’s biggest ally JD(U) and states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Punjab, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Telangana.

https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/agnipath-firestorm-farm-laws-caa-pushback-7980490/

---