“Unhappy the land that has no heroes!” –cried Andrea (Galileo’s disciple) in Bertolt Brecht’s iconic Life of Galileo. In India, the military has been canonised as a consensus hero of the nation, with a public consensus of doing whatever it takes to maintain the edge of the institution.Any change that seems to disturb the status quo, like the new Agnipath programme, invariably runs into a firestorm of controversy.