A troublesome future

If the BJP did not anticipate the students taking to the streets in such large numbers, the party also does not seem to have expected the citizenship law and the NRC to raise tempers to such a pitch. It is possible that the party had been lulled into believing that it will be able to get away with anything by the ease with which it succeeded in dispensing with the constitutional provisions granting special status to Kashmir. Given the magnitude of its drastic step in Kashmir, including the conversion of the state into a Union Territory, the jailing of all the mainstream leaders and the shutting down of the Internet for months on end, the citizenship law and the NRC may have seemed to the government to be no more than routine measures.