Dear Express reader, This week, the parade and spectacle of Republic Day was overtaken and overshadowed. A months’ long farmers’ agitation that had remained patient and peaceful took a violent turn. The lumpen act of the hoisting of a flag, which was not the Tricolour, from the ramparts of the Red Fort threatened to edge out the many images of farmers camping out in the cold to register their opposition to farm laws at Delhi’s door. This was also a week when a government crackdown began, criminalising the farmer and targeting the journalist. Yes, the violence at the Red Fort and other sites in the national capital after a section of the participants in the farmers’ tractor march on January 26 deviated from the designated routes was reprehensible. Yes, for those scenes of disorder, the due process must be taken forward, the culprits must be brought to book. But surely, the events of January 26 cannot justify the FIRs filed indiscriminately against farm union leaders who were till a few days ago talking with the Centre, and who have remained visibly committed to peaceful modes of protest. Or the apparent use by the government of those events to target journalists, who are being charged with sedition, no less, in cases filed in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. So, take your pick of the bigger desecration. Which is worse, the vandalism of January 26, or the government-police repression in its aftermath? That question must be challenged, not answered. The task of choosing the bigger outrage can be intellectually and morally debilitating. By imposing an artificially tidy either-or, it papers over the real-life spills and left-overs. We should be able to say, as this paper has editorially, that the violence of January 26 was shameful, and that the sweeping FIRs against farmers and journalists charging them under draconian laws in the aftermath are intimidatory and erase crucial distinctions. They are unacceptable in a constitutional democracy that guarantees basic freedoms, including the right to disagree with the government and to express that disagreement in protest. At the same time, January 26 and its aftermath have also raised some other important concerns. One set of issues has to do with the inner life of protest. Who takes responsibility when a section of a large mass mobilisation veers off track? What should be the way forward, and what, if any, the forms of atonement? These questions become all the more difficult when the mobilisation is, like the farmers’ agitation, largely leader-less. Another set of questions and concerns has to do with the media. The cases of sedition against journalists who are accused of misreporting the death of a protester are completely bizarre. But the apparent error that was made, and acknowledged subsequently, throws into sharp relief the mounting challenge for the media in times when its space is being squeezed by the majoritarian mob on one side and the populist politician on the other, and when large sections have already caved in to those pressures. The task of winning back trust for the institution of the media, and for wresting a calm and neutral space amid the pull and push of ‘us vs them’ narratives, makes it necessary to look within. To call mistakes by their name, to keep things in proportion and in perspective. But, of course, for the movement to grapple with its renegades, or for the media to summon its inner resources, there is a pre-condition — first, the criminal cases under draconian laws must be withdrawn. There can be no soul-searching in the shadow of the FIR. Till next week, Vandita | 
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