(The article was originally published in Indian Express as a part of Dr Ram Madhav’s column titled Ram Rajya on August 29, 2026. Views expressed are personal.)
Prime minister Narendra Modi has an enviable knack of getting under the skin of his adversaries. He did something similar in his address from the Red Fort ramparts on the Independence Day. “For years, people with Maoist thinking were there in public life, even in government committees. This thinking had affected various institutions and initiatives”, he reminded adding that while his government had succeeded in eliminating Naxals with weapons completely but those supporting that process still continue to operate. “We need to identify these ‘dimagi Naxals’, isolate them, and bring the youth together for a developed country”, prime minister insisted.
Prime minister’s ‘Dimagi Naxals’ invocation became a proverbial cat among the pigeons. There was indignation all around certain sections. Their discomfiture was further compounded by the commentaries of the overzealous supporters of the prime minister on social media. Congress leader P. Chidambaram was the first to betray this unease. “I am proud to be a Dimagi Naxal” he declared on the social media platform X, inviting catcalls and criticism from the establishment side accusing the Congress as the party of Dimagi Naxals. Editors Guild jumped in complaining about the portrayal of some journalists as Dimagi Naxals. All in all, prime minister’s reference to the phrase seems to have rattled a section of Lutyens’ elite.
It is not always necessary to explain these things. Certain amount of ambiguity that allows polemics to go on is harmless and enjoyable. In the past too, expressions like ‘Urban Naxals’ and ‘Khan Market Gang’ were invoked, eliciting heated debates. While no one defined what exactly those references meant, wise people drew their own meanings and conclusions.
My intention is also not to explain what the prime minister meant when he used the expression but only to provide the context. Maoism, ideological foundation of the Naxal movement, is not just a militant program. It is a well-developed ideology globally that spawned several movements across a number of countries. Mao had himself championed it in China while the Sino-Soviet rift in 1950s and 60s had led to the emergence of this major theoretical tradition soon absorbed by revolutionary theorists, poets, philosophers, and eventually the insurgent groups. In Cuba, Che Guvera led this Maoist ideology of guerilla warfare through the concept of Foco Theory, which argued that a small group of highly dedicated armed guerillas could generate conditions for a political revolution through armed action. Such leaders existed in several other countries too, like Chairman Gonzalo in Peru and Jose Maria Sison in Philippines. In our own neighbourhood, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ ran a Maoist war through his “Prachanda Path”, which was a theoretical fusion of protracted people’s war with urban mass uprisings. There were eminent intellectuals like the French philosophers Alain Badiou, Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir who ran popular Maoist periodicals and developed strong ideological arguments in support of the violent ideology.
In India, we have had our own intellectual torch-bearers of this movement like Charu Majumdar, Kanai Chatterjee and Kanu Sanyal, who were the founders of Naxalism not just as a guerilla movement but also an ideological bullwork against the democratic state. In independent India, the Naxal movement emerged as the most potent threat to the state apparatus in a number of states from Bengal and Bihar in the North to Andhra Pradesh and Kerala in the South. Tribal dominated areas in states like Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand became the main operational areas of the insurgents. Over decades, this movement has succeeded in building a strong overground movement too with the help of academics, journalists, authors and other public intellectuals. While the armed Naxal cadre indulged in ruthless and senseless violence across rural and tribal areas, the urban civil support system provided the intellectual shield for their actions.
It is interesting to recall what the Union Home Ministry of UPA government had told the Supreme Court in 2013 in Kishore Samrite vs Union of India matter. “The ideologues and supporters of the CPI (Maoist) Party in cities and towns have undertaken a concerted and systematic propaganda against the State to project the State in a poor light and also malign it through disinformation”, it said, adding the most critical observation that: “In fact, it is these ideologues who have kept the Maoist movement alive and are in many ways more dangerous than the cadres of the ‘People’s Liberation Guerilla Army’”. The affidavit also stated that the Maoist strategy “is to mobilise certain targeted sections of the population, especially the urban population, through the ‘mass organisations’ which are otherwise known as ‘front organisations’”. These mass organisations operate “under the garb of Human Rights NGOs” and “generally manned by ideologues, who include academics and activists”, the UPA government contended.
Whether the Modi government defined who the Dimagi Naxals are or not, the UPA government’s affidavit took pains to do that categorically by telling the Apex Court that the ideological line these forces profess is “to overthrow the democratically elected parliamentary form of government in India through a combination of armed insurrection, mass mobilisation of certain sections of the society and tactical partnerships”.
Looking around, we see this mindset continuing to appear in various forms even today, in the allusive call of a senior opposition leader in the wake of Gen Z revolt in Nepal that Gen Z in India too would “save the constitution”, or the open call by a Lutyens intellectual that the future of democracy in India will be settled on the streets rather than through elections or the parliament.
Where is the need to define “Dimagi Naxals”?
