From Primitive Communes to the Modern Republic—and the Dangerous Politics of Turning Thought into Suspicion
By Ramphal Kataria
“When the gun disappears but the label survives, the battlefield has moved—from the forest into the mind.”
Abstract
The Prime Minister's Independence Day warning in August 2026 that India must identify and isolate “dimagi Naxals” marks a significant new stage in the political vocabulary surrounding dissent. The phrase follows the earlier expression “urban Naxal” and belongs to a broader political lexicon in which ideological disagreement, protest, intellectual criticism and opposition politics are increasingly described through the language of national security. The government has clarified that the expression is directed at those who support Maoists, separatism or positions allegedly hostile to the Constitution. (The Times of India) Yet the political significance of the phrase extends beyond this clarification.
This article examines the historical question underlying the controversy: how did a society move from communal forms of production through private property, slavery, feudalism and capitalism to the socialist and communist critiques of modern society? It then follows the intellectual journey from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Mao, the complicated participation of the Indian Left in the freedom struggle, the post-Independence Communist movement, Telangana, Naxalbari and the emergence of Maoist insurgency.
The article argues for a distinction that is indispensable to a constitutional democracy: Maoist armed insurgency is not the same thing as Marxist thought; Marxist thought is not the same thing as Communist electoral politics; Communist politics is not the same thing as Naxalite violence; and dissent is not synonymous with any of them.
India has every constitutional and security justification for combating armed insurgency. But if the vocabulary of insurgency is extended to students, academics, journalists, civil-rights activists and political critics merely because they question the government, the result is not the strengthening of the Republic but the narrowing of democratic imagination.
The deeper question is therefore not whether India will defeat Naxalism. It already has largely defeated its armed form. The question is whether the Republic can distinguish between an enemy with a gun and a citizen with an argument.
Keywords: Dimagi Naxal, Urban Naxal, dissent, democracy, Marxism, Maoism, Naxalism, political labelling, constitutionalism, student movements, India
I. The phrase that arrived after the war
On 15 August 2026, from the Red Fort, Narendra Modi declared that India had substantially defeated armed Naxalism but warned that “dimagi Naxals” remained. He said such people were embedded in society and were looking for opportunities to create unrest, and called upon citizens to identify and isolate them. (Al Jazeera)
The phrase immediately provoked a political controversy.
The following day, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju attempted to define the category more narrowly. According to him, the Prime Minister was not referring to Opposition leaders as such, but to people who support Maoists and reject the Constitution, separatists supporting Article 370, and those advocating separation of the Northeast from India. (The Times of India)
That clarification deserves to be taken seriously.
But it does not remove the larger political question.
Why is the word “Naxal” being attached to an intellectual or ideological category at all?
The word has a precise historical association. Naxalbari was not a seminar. Maoist insurgency was not a newspaper editorial. The CPI (Maoist) is not a debating society. Armed Left-Wing Extremism has involved killings, extortion, attacks on security personnel, destruction of infrastructure and violent attempts to overthrow the constitutional order.
The Indian State is not only entitled but obliged to confront it.
And it has done so with considerable success.
Government figures show that LWE-related violence fell from 1,936 incidents in 2010 to 234 in 2025; deaths of civilians and security personnel fell from 1,005 to 100. The number of affected districts also collapsed dramatically. (Press Information Bureau)
So the first intellectual honesty of this article must be stated clearly:
Naxalite violence is real. Maoist insurgency is real. Its victims are real. The State's success against it is real.
But precisely because armed Naxalism is being defeated, the emergence of a new category called “dimagi Naxal” deserves scrutiny.
The question becomes:
Who is the new enemy?
II. Before capitalism: when property itself was not yet the organising principle
The history of Marxism cannot be understood by beginning with Marx.
It begins with a much older human question:
Who owns the things necessary for life?
For most of human history, the answer was not “the corporation”, “the landlord” or even “the individual proprietor”.
Early human communities survived through collective activity. Hunting, gathering, fishing and early agriculture required cooperation. Land, water, forests and other resources were often governed through communal or customary arrangements, although such societies were neither uniformly egalitarian nor identical.
Marx later attempted to understand these transformations historically.
In his writings on pre-capitalist economic formations, he emphasised that the individual did not originally stand outside the community as an isolated owner. The individual's relationship to land was mediated by membership of a social community. (Marxists Internet Archive)
This is important because it challenges the simplistic idea that private property is an eternal and natural institution.
It has a history.
So does inequality.
So does class.
So does the State.
As agricultural societies developed, surplus became possible. Surplus created the possibility of accumulation. Accumulation created hierarchy. Hierarchy increasingly became institutionalised through political and military power.
The transformation was enormous:
community → surplus → property → hierarchy → class → State.
This was not a single universal sequence followed identically by every society. Human history is far more complicated. But it captures an important historical-materialist insight: social institutions are connected to the ways human beings organise production and distribute resources.
III. From slavery to feudalism
The ancient world saw forms of slavery on a massive scale.
The slave was not merely poor.
The slave could become property.
This distinction matters because class exploitation changes its institutional form across history.
Under feudalism, the dominant relationship became different. Land became the principal source of wealth and political power. The peasant or serf might not be legally equivalent to a slave, but his economic relationship to the landowner remained profoundly unequal.
The landlord controlled land.
The peasant worked it.
The social surplus moved upward.
Feudal society was therefore not simply an economic arrangement. It was a political and cultural order. Rank, inheritance, religion, military authority and landholding reinforced each other.
India, of course, developed its own extraordinarily complex agrarian and caste structures. European feudalism cannot simply be transplanted onto Indian history.
But the broader point remains:
economic relations produce social hierarchies, and social hierarchies acquire political institutions to reproduce themselves.
This would become one of the central questions of Marxism.
IV. Capitalism: liberation and exploitation at the same time
Capitalism shattered much of the feudal order.
Markets expanded.
Urban centers grew.
Science and technology accelerated production.
The individual became increasingly liberated from feudal status.
Capitalism created unprecedented productive power.
Marx recognised this.
The Communist Manifesto is often read only as an indictment of capitalism. It is also an extraordinary recognition of capitalism's revolutionary capacity to transform production and society.
But capitalism introduced another contradiction.
The worker became legally free.
And economically dependent.
A feudal serf belonged to a feudal order.
The capitalist worker was formally free to sell labour.
But without ownership of productive resources, the worker had to sell labour to survive.
The capitalist owned capital.
The worker owned labour-power.
This was the central contradiction Marx attempted to analyse.
Marx's theory of “primitive accumulation” examined how capitalism emerged through the separation of producers from their means of production and the transformation of land and labour into elements of capitalist accumulation. (Historical Materialism)
Capitalism therefore carried two contradictory tendencies.
It liberated.
And it concentrated.
It democratised legal status.
And concentrated economic power.
It enormously increased productive capacity.
And periodically produced unemployment, insecurity and crises.
Marx's historical importance lies less in predicting every detail of the future than in asking a question that remains relevant:
Who controls the economic system that controls our lives?
V. Marxism was a theory—not a criminal category
This distinction is essential to the present controversy.
Karl Marx was not Naxal.
Friedrich Engels was not Naxal.
Lenin was not Naxal.
Mao was not Naxal.
Naxalbari occurred in India in 1967—decades after Marx's death and half a century after the Russian Revolution.
The political history of Marxism subsequently divided into multiple traditions.
Lenin adapted Marxism to the political and economic conditions of imperial Russia.
Mao adapted Marxist revolutionary theory to China.
European Communist parties developed parliamentary strategies.
Social democratic parties moved in different directions.
Asian Communist movements adopted still other forms.
Thus there is no intellectually defensible equation:
Marxism = Maoism = Naxalism = terrorism = dissent.
That equation is historically false.
Mao's adaptation of Marxism itself demonstrates the point. His rise within the Chinese Communist Party was associated with an argument that Marxism had to be adapted to Chinese circumstances rather than mechanically copied from Soviet experience.
The irony is striking.
Marxism itself developed by questioning orthodoxy.
Yet “dimagi Naxal” appears to suggest that questioning the established political order is itself suspicious.
VI. Lenin, Mao and the Revolutionary State: A Marxist Reading
A Marxist reading of Lenin and Mao cannot be reduced to the proposition that “revolutionary movements became authoritarian.” Marxism asks a more fundamental question: what material conditions produced the revolutionary State, what class relations did it seek to transform, and why did new contradictions emerge within it?
Marx did not regard the State as a neutral institution standing above society. In a class-divided society, political power is closely connected with economic power. The State therefore reflects, and seeks to preserve or transform, particular relations of property and production. Revolution, in this sense, is not merely the replacement of one government by another; it seeks to transform the social relations underlying political power.
Lenin's State and Revolution developed this argument in the context of Tsarist Russia. The Bolsheviks did not inherit a functioning liberal democracy. They emerged from war, economic collapse, social inequality and the disintegration of an autocratic order. Lenin therefore argued that the existing State machinery could not simply be taken over unchanged by the working class.
Yet this produced a profound contradiction: the State created to overcome class domination itself acquired enormous political power. Civil war, foreign intervention, economic devastation and counter-revolutionary violence intensified this concentration. Under Stalin, it developed into an extensive system of political repression, purges and forced collectivisation. A Marxist analysis must explain these historical conditions without turning explanation into justification.
The deeper question is therefore: how can a revolutionary State prevent its own political apparatus from becoming a new source of domination?
Mao and the Chinese adaptation of Marxism
Mao confronted a different historical reality. China was predominantly agrarian, marked by landlordism, imperial domination and a weak industrial working class. Mao therefore adapted Marxist revolutionary theory to Chinese conditions, placing the peasantry and the countryside at the centre of revolutionary mobilisation.
This was an important theoretical development: Marxism was treated not as a rigid formula but as a method to be applied to concrete historical conditions.
But Mao's China also demonstrates the dangers of revolutionary power. The Great Leap Forward produced catastrophic consequences, while the Cultural Revolution sought to combat what Mao perceived as bureaucratisation and the emergence of a privileged “capitalist-road” tendency within the Party itself.
The paradox was profound. An attempt to prevent the revolutionary State from becoming bureaucratic generated another form of political coercion. Intellectuals, officials and ordinary citizens became targets of ideological campaigns, while universities and institutions were deeply disrupted.
The lesson is not simply that Marxism is authoritarian. It is more demanding: a political movement committed to liberation must constantly examine whether its own institutions are reproducing the domination they were created to abolish.
The politics of the “enemy”
This history also raises a wider question: Who is the enemy?
Revolutionary movements may have legitimate reasons to identify organised counter-revolutionary forces. But danger begins when an identifiable political act or organisation becomes an undefined category of consciousness.
The “class enemy” or “counter-revolutionary” can gradually cease to mean someone engaged in demonstrable hostile activity and become a label attached to people considered ideologically suspect.
Here lies a universal lesson.
Political power becomes particularly dangerous when it begins to police thought rather than conduct.
This does not mean that the Soviet Union, Maoist China, fascist regimes and contemporary democracies are equivalent. They are historically and institutionally very different. But every political system can develop a vocabulary through which certain citizens are placed outside the boundaries of legitimate political belonging.
From “class enemy” to “dimagi Naxal”
This brings the argument back to contemporary India.
The State is fully justified in combating armed Maoist organisations that use violence against civilians and security forces and seek to overthrow the constitutional order. There is no equivalence between armed insurgency and legitimate political dissent.
The difficulty begins when the category moves from Maoist organisation to “dimagi Naxal.”
Who exactly is included?
A person who supports armed Maoism? Clearly, the law can deal with such conduct.
But what about a Marxist?
A Communist?
A professor?
A student?
A journalist?
A civil-rights activist?
A citizen demanding land reform, employment, educational reform or social equality?
These categories cannot automatically be equated.
Indeed, from a Marxist perspective, contradiction is not necessarily a disease of society; it is one of the forces through which societies change. Suppressing every contradiction does not eliminate it. It merely drives it into different political forms.
The real question, therefore, is not whether Marxism, Maoism or revolutionary politics has historically produced authoritarian tendencies. It certainly has. The question is whether the State can distinguish between an armed enemy and a citizen with an argument.
That distinction is fundamental to a constitutional democracy.
The lesson of Lenin and Mao is not that revolutionary power alone is dangerous. It is that every concentration of political power must be interrogated—including power exercised in the name of the people.
And that is precisely where the phrase “dimagi Naxal” deserves the closest scrutiny: when political conduct becomes indistinguishable from political thought, dissent itself begins to appear as evidence of guilt.
VII. India's freedom movement was itself a movement of dissent
There is a profound historical irony in using Independence Day to warn against dissent.
India became independent because Indians refused to accept the political legitimacy of the established State.
The British government considered many forms of nationalist politics unlawful.
Newspapers were censored.
Political leaders were imprisoned.
Revolutionaries were executed.
Workers struck.
Students demonstrated.
Peasants rebelled.
Gandhi launched civil disobedience.
The Quit India Movement of 1942 demanded that the British leave India. The government responded with mass arrests and repression. Official historical accounts record the breadth of the movement and the detention of thousands. (Press Information Bureau)
The crucial point is not that every freedom fighter used the same method.
They did not.
Gandhi rejected violence.
Bhagat Singh embraced revolutionary violence against colonial rule.
Ambedkar pursued constitutional transformation.
Subhas Chandra Bose pursued armed struggle through the INA.
Socialists organised workers and peasants.
Communists pursued their own changing strategies.
The Indian freedom struggle was therefore not a single ideological movement.
It was a vast field of political disagreement united, at crucial moments, by opposition to colonial domination.
That is why the Republic's constitutional tradition should be suspicious of political systems that demand ideological uniformity.
VIII. The Communist paradox in the freedom struggle
The Indian Communist movement has its own complicated history.
It would be dishonest to portray the CPI's role during the entire freedom struggle as identical to that of Congress nationalism.
After the Soviet Union entered the Second World War following Hitler's invasion, Communist strategy changed substantially. The CPI opposed the Quit India call after 1941–42, a position that remains one of the most controversial chapters of its history.
But that does not erase Communist participation in workers' struggles, peasant mobilisation and anti-feudal struggles.
The Telangana struggle became one of the most important Communist-led peasant movements in India. The CPI's own historical account describes it as a struggle against the Nizam's autocratic order and feudal exploitation. (CPI Official App)
Punnapra-Vayalar and other working-class and peasant struggles likewise became part of India's wider social history.
Post-Independence, Communists entered Parliament.
They formed governments.
They governed Kerala.
They governed West Bengal for decades.
They ran trade unions.
They participated in elections.
They wrote books.
They taught in universities.
They produced poets, historians, economists and journalists.
Some revolutionary Communists rejected parliamentary politics.
Others embraced it.
Again:
Communism was never one single Indian political phenomenon.
IX. Naxalbari: the point where the word acquired its Indian meaning
The Naxalbari uprising of 1967 transformed the vocabulary.
The uprising began in a particular agrarian context in West Bengal. Revolutionary Communists rejected the parliamentary strategy of the established Communist parties and argued that India required a Maoist revolutionary path.
Charu Mazumdar became one of its principal ideologues.
The movement spread.
It produced armed struggles.
It also produced killings, targeted violence and state repression.
The revolutionary Left eventually fragmented into numerous organisations.
The later CPI (Maoist) became the principal armed Maoist formation.
This is where the distinction between Left ideology and armed insurgency becomes indispensable.
India can legitimately prosecute an armed organisation seeking to overthrow the State.
But it cannot logically follow that anyone who has read Mao belongs to that organisation.
Nor can it follow that anyone advocating land reform, socialism, workers' rights, tribal rights or economic redistribution is a Maoist.
That would be the equivalent of arguing that every person who reads Rousseau is a Jacobin or every person who reads Savarkar is a militant revolutionary.
Ideas travel across boundaries.
Political identity requires evidence.
X. The remarkable decline of armed Naxalism
There is another irony in the present debate.
The Indian State has actually succeeded to a remarkable degree in weakening armed Naxalism.
Official data show that LWE violence fell by roughly 88% between 2010 and 2025. The number of affected districts has fallen dramatically, and the government claims that India reached a “Naxal-free” milestone on 31 March 2026. (Press Information Bureau)
This achievement should not be dismissed.
Thousands of civilians and security personnel have suffered because of Maoist violence.
If the armed movement is now close to extinction, that is a major achievement of the Indian State.
But it creates a conceptual problem for the new rhetoric.
If the armed enemy is disappearing, who becomes the ideological enemy?
The answer appears to be the “dimagi Naxal”.
And this is where the democratic debate must become sharper.
XI. From “Urban Naxal” to “Dimagi Naxal”
“Urban Naxal” emerged as an attempt to describe alleged intellectual and logistical support structures for Maoist insurgency.
It subsequently became a broad political epithet.
Academics.
Artists.
Journalists.
Lawyers.
Activists.
Students.
Opposition politicians.
Civil-rights groups.
People critical of the government.
The category became elastic.
That elasticity is its political power.
A precisely defined category can be tested.
An elastic category cannot.
If “Naxal” means member of a prohibited armed organisation, evidence can establish membership.
If “Naxal” means anyone who disagrees with the government, the category becomes unlimited.
And “dimagi” makes it more elastic still.
The gun has disappeared.
The mind remains.
The implication is disturbing:
the State no longer needs to discover the weapon; it only needs to discover the thought.
That is precisely the point at which a democracy should pause.
XII. The Bhima Koregaon experience
The Bhima Koregaon case provides the most powerful modern illustration of this tension.
Among those arrested were lawyers, academics, poets, writers and activists, including Sudha Bharadwaj, Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, Varavara Rao, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Shoma Sen, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling and others.
The Bhima Koregaon case cannot be analyzed merely as an unfortunate "procedural delay" or an abstract tension within liberal constitutionalism. Instead, it serves as a stark illustration of how the capitalist State utilizes its legal and coercive apparatuses—specifically statutory measures like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA)—to perform a class function: suppressing dissent and safeguarding established class relations.
The State is not a neutral arbiter balancing individual liberty against national security; it is a instrument of class rule used by the ruling class to maintain socio-economic hegemony. The intellectuals, lawyers, poets, and activists targeted in the Bhima Koregaon case—often referred to as organic intellectuals in Gramscian terms—were precisely those articulating the struggles of the marginalized classes, particularly Dalits, Adivasis, and workers against state-backed corporate land grabs and political dispossession.
By subjecting these activists to prolonged pre-trial detention, the bourgeois legal framework transforms procedural mechanisms into punishment itself. The endless deferral of a timely trial serves a structural purpose: it neutralizes ideological opposition, instills fear in grassroots class organizing, and renders resistance functionally impossible without the state needing to meet the burden of proof. The death of Father Stan Swamy in custody exemplifies the violence inherent in the coercive state apparatus when confronted with systemic criticism.
Ultimately, it reveals that appealing strictly to "constitutional republic principles" or a "proper democratic position" overlooks the material reality of class power. The prolonged incarceration without trial is not an accidental breakdown of the judicial system, but rather an intentional exercise of state power designed to discipline working-class political consciousness and preserve the status quo.
XIII. The student has now entered the battlefield
This is where the 2026 CJP movement becomes politically significant.
The Cockroach Janta Party did something politically clever.
It took an insult and converted it into identity.
What began around youth anger and examination-related grievances developed into a 49-day protest at Jantar Mantar. The agitation ended after the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and government assurances concerning protesters, FIRs, compensation and reforms. (India Today)
That episode cannot simply be dismissed as Maoist agitation.
The central issues were examinations, paper leaks, educational opportunity, youth employment and accountability.
And these are precisely the issues that can produce political mobilisation in any democracy.
A young person who spends years preparing for a competitive examination does not need Marx to become angry when the examination system fails.
A graduate who cannot find employment does not need Mao to understand unemployment.
A parent who spends a fortune on coaching does not need Lenin to resent an examination leak.
A student demanding institutional accountability is not automatically revolutionary.
Sometimes frustration is simply frustration.
XIV. Why “dimagi Naxal” may be politically different
“Urban Naxal” primarily targeted an intellectual category.
“Dimagi Naxal” goes further.
It identifies the mind itself as the site of suspicion.
That is politically significant.
Because every democracy needs citizens capable of saying:
Why?
Why did the examination fail?
Why is unemployment rising?
Why is inflation hurting households?
Why are hospitals inaccessible?
Why is housing unaffordable?
Why are universities losing autonomy?
Why are journalists being pressured?
Why are protesters being detained?
Why does a policy benefit one group more than another?
These questions are the oxygen of constitutional democracy.
They are not Maoist.
They are republican.
XV. The politics of the “jumla”
Indian political discourse after 2014 has developed an unusually powerful vocabulary of political categorisation.
“Urban Naxal.”
“Tukde-tukde gang.”
“Andolanjeevi.”
“Khan Market gang.”
And now:
“Dimagi Naxal.”
The words differ.
The political function is similar.
They transform an argument into an identity.
Instead of asking:
“Is this criticism correct?”
the political conversation becomes:
“Who is making the criticism?”
This is a fundamental change in democratic reasoning.
Suppose a professor says that an education policy is wrong.
The answer should be evidence.
If a journalist says inflation is hurting families.
The answer should be data.
If a student says examinations are compromised.
The answer should be an investigation.
If an opposition leader says unemployment is rising.
The answer should be employment statistics.
But if the response is:
“Urban Naxal.”
or
“Dimagi Naxal.”
the argument has been avoided.
The speaker has been discredited without addressing the proposition.
This is rhetorically efficient.
But intellectually weak.
XVI. The State must distinguish thought from conduct
This is perhaps the central constitutional proposition of the entire article.
A democratic State regulates conduct.
It cannot legitimately regulate every thought.
A citizen may admire Marx.
Another may admire Savarkar.
Another may admire Gandhi.
Another may admire Ambedkar.
Another may admire Lenin.
Another may reject all of them.
The State does not need to adjudicate their ideological purity.
The Constitution protects speech and association subject to specified restrictions. Article 19 is not an unlimited licence, but neither is it an empty promise. The constitutional structure permits restrictions for defined reasons; it does not establish “disagreement with the government” as a prohibited category.
That distinction is the difference between:
constitutional government
and
government by ideological approval.
XVII. The danger of confusing opposition with insurrection
The government has an entirely legitimate argument when it says that Maoist organisations exploit grievances.
Armed insurgencies do attempt to create political narratives.
They do seek recruitment.
They do exploit alienation.
They do attempt to influence communities.
The State must remain vigilant.
But there is a logical trap.
If every genuine grievance is described as something Maoists might exploit, then eventually the grievance itself becomes suspect.
A tribal community demanding land rights can be labelled Maoist.
A student demanding examination reform can be labelled Maoist.
A journalist investigating police abuses can be labelled Maoist.
An academic studying insurgency can be labelled Maoist.
A civil-rights lawyer defending an accused Maoist can be labelled Maoist.
At that point, counter-insurgency ceases to be merely a security policy.
It becomes a theory of society.
And that is dangerous.
XVIII. India's real battlefield is material
The ultimate challenge to the “dimagi Naxal” narrative will not be another slogan.
It will be lived experience.
The young Indian does not wake up thinking about Mao.
He or she thinks about employment.
The parent thinks about school fees.
The student thinks about examination integrity.
The worker thinks about wages.
The farmer thinks about prices.
The patient thinks about hospital bills.
The middle class thinks about housing.
The poor think about food and dignity.
These are the material conditions from which political consciousness emerges.
Marx would have recognised the question immediately.
People do not live by political slogans alone.
They live through material relationships.
If governments solve material problems, dissent loses much of its explosive force.
If governments do not solve them, labels cannot permanently suppress them.
XIX. The great irony of history
There is a final irony.
Marxism itself emerged as a critique of established authority.
The Russian Revolution emerged against Tsarist authority.
The Chinese Revolution emerged against the existing political order.
The Indian freedom struggle emerged against British authority.
Every successful transformation begins as someone's unacceptable dissent.
The British could have called Gandhi a troublemaker.
The Tsar could have called Lenin a revolutionary extremist.
The Chinese Nationalist government called Mao a rebel.
Colonial India imprisoned nationalists under sedition laws.
History nevertheless changed.
This does not mean every dissenter is right.
It means something more important:
the State cannot determine the truth of an argument merely by determining the legal status of the person who makes it.
XX. Would India buy “Dimagi Naxal”?
That is the political experiment now underway.
Perhaps some will.
Political polarisation is real.
National security remains emotionally powerful.
Maoist violence has caused enormous suffering.
The word “Naxal” carries legitimate fear in regions that experienced insurgency.
But there is another India.
An India of students.
An India of unemployed graduates.
An India of first-generation university students.
An India of competitive-examination aspirants.
An India of workers.
An India of farmers.
An India of journalists.
An India of teachers.
An India of lawyers.
An India of citizens who may be patriotic and still deeply dissatisfied with the government.
That India cannot permanently be addressed through labels.
The CJP movement has already demonstrated something important: youth anger can cross ideological boundaries. Its mobilisation culminated in a political concession—the resignation of the Education Minister—and the government subsequently announced major youth-oriented initiatives, including free online coaching and AI training. (Financial Times)
The lesson is therefore not that CJP is necessarily correct about every issue.
The lesson is that unaddressed grievances create political energy.
Conclusion: The Republic must defend the right to think
The Indian State has defeated much of the armed Naxalite insurgency.
That is a fact.
The sacrifices of soldiers, police personnel and civilians cannot be erased.
That is also a fact.
But if armed Naxalism has been reduced to a tiny remnant, the solution cannot be to expand the definition of Naxalism until it includes everyone who thinks differently.
Because the moment “Naxal” stops meaning an identifiable relationship with armed revolutionary politics and begins meaning “someone whose thinking the government considers dangerous”, the word ceases to be a security description.
It becomes a political weapon.
And “dimagi” makes the weapon more intimate.
The gun is no longer in the forest.
The suspect is in the classroom.
The newspaper office.
The university.
The seminar hall.
The protest site.
The courtroom.
The editorial page.
The human-rights organisation.
The citizen's mind.
This is where the Republic must draw its line.
Not between Left and Right.
Not between government and Opposition.
Not between nationalist and anti-national.
But between violence and argument.
Between insurrection and protest.
Between terrorism and journalism.
Between criminal conduct and unpopular thought.
Between a gun and a question.
A government may defeat an insurgency with force.
But it cannot defeat an idea by giving it a derogatory adjective.
And it certainly cannot defeat unemployment, examination failure, inflation, poor healthcare, unaffordable housing or inequality by calling the people who complain about them “dimagi Naxals”.
The Republic was not created so that citizens would learn to keep their minds silent.
It was created so that they could use them.
The greatest danger to a democracy is not the citizen who thinks differently. It is the moment when the State begins to fear the citizen for thinking at all.
References
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.
2. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 1867.
3. Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.
4. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
5. V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 1902.
6. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, 1917.
7. Mao Zedong, On Practice, 1937.
8. Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, 1937.
9. Bipan Chandra et al., India's Struggle for Independence.
10. Bipan Chandra et al., India Since Independence.
11. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947.
12. A.R. Desai, Social Background of Indian Nationalism.
13. Government of India, Constitution of India, Article 19.
14. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, data on Left-Wing Extremism, 2025–26. (Press Information Bureau)
15. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Mao Zedong.”
16. Communist Party of India, historical account of the Communist movement and Telangana struggle. (CPI Official App)
17. Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, Three Glorious Decades of Naxalbari. (Publications)
18. Amnesty International, reports on the Bhima Koregaon accused and UAPA.
19. Human Rights Watch, reports on India, civil liberties and prolonged detention.
20. Contemporary reporting by The Hindu, Indian Express, India Today, AP, Reuters and other national/international publications on the “dimagi Naxal” controversy and the 2026 CJP movement. (Al Jazeera)
