India's prime minister has coined another enemy of the state. Nobody, including his own ministers, can quite say who it is
EVERY August 15th, Narendra Modi climbs the ramparts of the Red Fort, looks out over a flag-waving crowd, and unveils that year's model of Indian villain. In 2021 it was the "andolanjeevi," the professional protester. Before that came the "urban Naxal," a term flexible enough to cover novelists, professors and the odd Supreme Court-adjacent human-rights lawyer. This year's release, debuted on the same red sandstone stage on which Nehru once promised a "tryst with destiny," was the "dimagi Naxal" — the intellectual, or literally "brain," Naxal. Mr Modi did not say who exactly he meant. That, it turns out, was rather the point.
The prime minister's pitch was straightforward enough on its face. Armed Naxalism — the decades-old Maoist insurgency that has killed thousands across India's forested interior — has been substantially crushed, Mr Modi told the nation, crediting his own government's counter-insurgency drive. But a subtler enemy remains: people who carry the "Naxal mindset" without the gun, embedded, he suggested, in institutions and government committees, waiting for their moment to drag the country down "a wrong path." Such people, the prime minister said, needed to be "identified and isolated."
Identified by whom, using what evidence, is a question Mr Modi left entirely unanswered. This being India's television-and-Twitter republic, someone had to answer it eventually, and the job fell to Kiren Rijiju, the parliamentary affairs minister, who posted a clarification on X two days later. Dimagi Naxals, he explained, were people who support Maoists and reject the constitution, who back separatism and Article 370, or who wish to sever the northeast by severing the Siliguri Corridor — a geographic threat that, as clarifications go, is at least refreshingly specific. Mr Rijiju numbered his list one, two and four. There was no three. Whether this was an editing accident or an admission that the fourth criterion had quietly been withdrawn, nobody has explained, which feels appropriate: a typo in the rulebook for an offence that has no rulebook.
Sceptics might be forgiven for noting that this is not Mr Modi's first invented enemy, nor his fifth. Over a decade in office he has given India the "tukde-tukde gang" (those who would break the country into pieces), the "Khan Market gang" (Delhi's liberal elite, named for a shopping district), "vikas virodhi" (opponents of development) and "ration jeevi" (those who allegedly live off welfare handouts rather than work). Each arrived with the same basic design specification: maximum menace, minimum definition. A prime minister with a genuine surfeit of imagination might eventually run out of syllables to combine with "-jeevi" and "-virodhi." He has not yet.
The trouble with a category that has no criteria is that it can, in principle, expand to include anyone standing between the government and an uncomfortable question. India has been here before, and not merely rhetorically: the "urban Naxal" label, once similarly vague, was later cited in the Bhima-Koregaon investigation, in which activists, poets and octogenarian Jesuit priests were held for years under anti-terrorism law on charges that, in several cases, collapsed or remain unproven. A label is never just a label once a prosecutor has read it aloud in a First Information Report.
None of which stopped the reaction from also being, in places, extremely funny. P. Chidambaram, the Congress party's former home minister — a man who has personally run India's internal-security apparatus and presumably knows a real Maoist financing network when he sees one — responded to being implicitly accused of subversion with a single, gleeful sentence: "I am proud to be a dimagi naxal." It is hard to out-manoeuvre an insult that its target volunteers to wear as a medal. Within days, a satirical Instagram account calling itself the "Dimagi Naxal Party" had accumulated over 200,000 followers, doing more damage to the term's menace than any opposition press conference managed. Manoj Jha, an opposition MP, thanked the prime minister with mock sincerity for "adding a new term each year to the vocabulary," noting that when he had once asked Parliament what "urban Naxal" officially meant, the government's answer was that no such definition existed. Tej Pratap Yadav, a junior political scion with a gift for the unhelpful one-liner, suggested Mr Modi might find his largest concentration of dimagi Naxals inside his own party.
There is a genuine argument buried somewhere under all this, and it would be lazy to pretend otherwise. Ideological sympathy for Maoist violence has not vanished simply because the movement's armed wing has been battered in Chhattisgarh's forests; it is not obviously absurd for a government to worry that an ideology can outlive an insurgency. But a serious government worried about a serious problem publishes a white paper, names an organisation, points to evidence. It does not drop an unglossed epithet from a national podium and let a cabinet minister spend the following weekend improvising a definition on social media, complete with typographical evidence of his own confusion. What Mr Modi delivered on August 15th was not a security doctrine. It was a Rorschach test, engineered so that everyone from a retired home minister to a nervous student activist could plausibly see their own face in it — which, for a phrase intended to chill dissent rather than clarify it, may be precisely the feature and not the bug.
What Mr Modi handed the country from the Red Fort was not a definition. It was a blank warrant, and he left the name on it for someone else to fill in later — a magistrate, a police superintendent, an anonymous tip line, a WhatsApp forward. That is the entire design. A government that wanted to catch actual Maoist sympathisers would have named one. Instead it built a mirror and told the country to stare into it, so that a retired home minister, a nineteen-year-old with a protest placard, a journalist chasing a procurement contract, and a lawyer defending someone the state has already decided is guilty could all, plausibly, be made to fit. Vagueness of this kind is not sloppiness from a man who has spent a decade sharpening slogans into weapons. It is the weapon. A precise accusation can be argued with, appealed, disproven in a courtroom. A phrase with no fixed target cannot be argued with at all — it can only be waited out, and hoped it lands on somebody else. That, and not any actual insurgent lurking in a government committee, is what the Red Fort was defending this Independence Day: the state's right to accuse without ever having to prove.
The antidote to a blank warrant
If ambiguity is the government's weapon, the obvious countermeasure is to make the ambiguity expensive. Mr Manoj Jha's tactic — standing up years ago and simply asking Parliament what "urban Naxal" meant, then watching officials admit no such definition existed — remains the sharpest tool in the box. A label that cannot survive being asked "who, exactly, and under which law?" tends to wilt considerably faster than one merely shouted at.
Mockery works too, and worked here with unusual speed. A former home minister volunteering to be a dimagi Naxal, and an anonymous satirical Instagram account outpacing the term's own author in followers within days, did more to drain the phrase of menace than a fortnight of solemn press conferences would have. Insults survive on being feared; they rarely survive being worn as a badge.
The trouble is that memes fade and legislatures forget, while first information reports do not. "Urban Naxal," once a Twitter punchline, later turned up in the Bhima-Koregaon case, in which activists and an octogenarian priest spent years in custody under anti-terrorism law before several charges collapsed. The useful vigilance, then, is not the joke on day one but the paperwork years three through seven: whether NGOs, journalists and lawyers keep a file open long after the hashtag has died, and whether due process holds when a Red Fort punchline is finally cited in a courtroom rather than a comedy account.
One discipline is worth adding, since it is the one most citizens skip: answering an undefined slur with an equally undefined slur of one's own — "fascist," "authoritarian," pick a favourite — merely proves the government's implicit point, that precision is optional in Indian politics. The sturdier response is to hold everyone, including the opposition, to the standard Mr Jha demanded of the government: name the target, cite the law, or say nothing at all.
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