On 20 August, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s official handle on X doubled down on its new ideological offensive, "Dimagi Naxals", by sharing a video captioned: “When violence is intellectualised, terrorists are humanised, and soldiers are interrogated, you know exactly where the priorities lie.”
The video made the operational pivot explicit—sovereign boundaries are no longer drawn solely along contested territorial borders, but within an invisible and boundless perimeter of thought.
Rather than framing internal security around physical battlegrounds, the political apparatus has expanded its target into the human intellect. Citizens are actively primed to remain hyper-vigilant against "Dimagi Naxals”, individuals alleged to harbour a subversive, disruptive mindset operating within university campuses, civil liberties networks, trade unions, and public institutions.
This escalation arrives against the immediate backdrop of large-scale student mobilisations at Jantar Mantar and regional capitals, where thousands have gathered to protest systemic unemployment, recurrent examination paper leaks, and bureaucratic opacity. Rather than engaging these agitations as routine democratic feedback, the political establishment reflexively introduces labels to cast structural grievances as the work of hidden ideological saboteurs.
To understand the gravity of this shift, the coinage must be seen neither as accidental nor as an isolated insult. It represents the conceptual culmination of a decade-long wordplay strategy designed to shift suspicion from physical acts to the realm of thought.
From Blind Loyalty to Critical Thinking
Over the past 12 years, the vocabulary deployed by the ruling BJP and its ideological affiliates to characterise civic opposition has evolved along a consistent, escalating continuum.
This progression moved steadily from attacking patriotic allegiance to questioning territorial integrity, then targeting institutional networks, slipping into open dehumanisation, and ultimately arriving at the direct policing of human cognition.
The trajectory began around 2014-2016 with the ubiquitous deployment of the term "Anti-National." Surfacing prominently during campus demonstrations and debates around the colonial-era sedition law, this label created a rigid moral binary. Any structural questioning of State decisions, whether regarding national security doctrine, regional autonomy, or economic policy, was equated with treason against the republic itself.
By 2016-2017, the vocabulary incorporated territorial paranoia through the phrase "Tukde-Tukde Gang." Originating in partisan broadcasts and campaign speeches, this label imputed literal balkanisation conspiracies to university organisers, civil rights litigators, and Opposition leaders, portraying public dissent as an active plot to dismember the Indian territory.
The rhetoric underwent a major operational evolution around 2018 during the Bhima Koregaon investigations with the introduction of "Urban Naxals." This label bridged the gap between non-violent civil rights advocacy and statutory anti-terror laws such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). It posited that the true masterminds of violent insurgencies were not forest-dwelling guerrillas, but metropolitan academics, lawyers, writers, and trade union organisers utilising institutional spaces to wage asymmetric warfare against the State.
As youth protests erupted in July 2026, political rhetoric increasingly dipped into the vocabulary of open dehumanisation, with derogatory labels such as "cockroaches" surfacing in polemical exchanges to dismiss protestors as street pests. While the satirical Cockroach Janta Party turned the State's insults back on itself, the underlying institutional objective remained unchanged—to erode public empathy for young citizens demanding their constitutional rights.
https://www.thequint.com/opinion/how-cockroach-janta-party-fits-into-a-global-political-traditionThe arrival of "Dimagi Naxal" on the 2026 Independence Day represents the ultimate conceptual boundary of this linguistic dragnet.
The Propaganda of Distraction and Narrative Inversion
Why does an administration, more than seven decades after Independence, feel compelled to continuously manufacture new categories of internal enemies?
Whenever public demand for governmental accountability peaks, the introduction of a polarising, high-decibel label manufactures an instant media spectacle. When citizens mobilise around material grievances, such as exam leaks, hospital shortages, train overcrowding, and youth joblessness, the State responds with a rhetorical counter-strike by inventing an elite label like "Dimagi Naxal" or "Anti-National." The public sphere is abruptly diverted from auditing governance failures into debating the semantic merits of the latest label.
This dynamic executes a profound narrative inversion, the citizen demanding transparency is recast as an aggressor and a national security hazard, while the State apparatus, possessing an absolute monopoly on legislative and coercive power, portrays itself as an embattled victim of shadowy cognitive plots.
By institutionalising these labels as everyday common sense, public discourse is trapped within linguistic theatre, shielding core administrative machinery and governance failures behind the rhetoric of national defence.
Through a Foucauldian lens, replacing the hunt for armed insurgents with the rhetoric of "Dimagi Naxals" marks a shift from sovereign violence to disciplinary power. By criminalising critical inquiry as an ideological disease, the State establishes a panoptic regime of truth where citizens internalise the gaze of authority and self-censor. Consequently, control is achieved not through physical force, but through the constant fear of categorisation, suppressing dissent before it can be voiced.
The Physical Decay of the Public Sphere
The State's preoccupation with cognitive enemies stands in sharp, unflattering contrast to the material decay of public infrastructure across the country.
The conditions within government primary schools across the country reveal severe systemic neglect. Thousands of schools operate out of dilapidated rooms with leaking ceilings during the monsoon, lacking functional toilets for female students, deprived of safe drinking water, and running on abysmal student-teacher ratios. The mid-day meal scheme, designed as a vital nutritional lifeline, is repeatedly marred by corruption and poor food quality.
This structural decay is not an abstract statistical phenomenon, it directly penalises children from impoverished, Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan backgrounds whose families cannot afford the exorbitant fees of private education.
A similar rot characterises the public healthcare system. If independent citizen groups carry out sustained public audits of Primary Health Centres (PHCs), Community Health Centres (CHCs), block clinics, and district hospitals, the reality of Indian public health becomes undeniable, severe shortages of life-saving medicines, absent doctors, broken diagnostic equipment, and unhygienic wards where the poorest citizens are left without basic dignity.
These are the material failures that define the daily lives of citizens. Yet, when young people point their cameras at leaking classrooms or overcrowded train compartments, the State’s response is not a budgetary overhaul or an administrative audit, but the launch of a new rhetorical war against "subversive minds."
Counter-Conduct and the Generation of Counter-Knowledge
In Foucault’s formulation of power, domination is never total: "Where there is power, there is resistance." This resistance often manifests as counter-conduct, the active refusal of subjects to be governed in a specific manner.
The growing movement of youth and students across the country represents an essential enactment of counter-conduct. At Jantar Mantar and across regional campuses, students have refused to be diverted by ideological labels, organising an education and accountability movement. In Jharkhand, where an Opposition coalition held power, sustained youth agitations forced the state government to concede to their demands regarding job recruitment and exam transparency, proving that this fight for accountability is non-partisan.
This counter-knowledge shatters the polished, digitised narratives of governance promoted through official advertisements. By measuring State performance against physical reality, citizen audits strip away the rhetorical smokescreen.
The confrontation between the label "Dimagi Naxal" and the student audit movement is ultimately a clash between an elite discursive regime demanding blind obedience and an organic movement of citizens asserting democratic truth through empirical verification.
The Orwellian Mirror of 1984
The continuous generation of these pejorative categories bears an unmistakable resemblance to the political mechanics of George Orwell’s 1984.
In Orwell’s Oceania, the ruling party recognised that the most effective way to eliminate political opposition was to corrupt language through Newspeak. Newspeak was deliberately engineered to diminish the range of human thought, stripping away nuanced vocabulary until complex critiques of power became literally unthinkable. In the contemporary Indian public sphere, semantic reductionism achieves the same result, labels like "Anti-National" and "Dimagi Naxal" replace nuanced policy debate with thought-terminating clichés designed to shut down cognitive reflection.
Similarly, this mirrors Oceania's concept of Crimethink (Thoughtcrime), where the act of critical reflection itself is criminalised.
This dynamic reproduces the psychological function of the Two Minutes Hate, in which collective public frustration over rationing, administrative decay, and social anxiety was systematically redirected toward Emmanuel Goldstein, the party's manufactured, permanent saboteur.
In India today, media campaigns and political rhetoric systematically steer public anxiety away from administrative delivery and channel it into fear of an ever-present, internal cognitive enemy.
How long can any political establishment govern by relying on the machinery of labels, surveillance, and rhetorical distraction?
The historical trajectory from "Anti-National" to "Tukde-Tukde Gang", "Urban Naxal", and "Dimagi Naxal" reveals a political power structure increasingly uneasy with public scrutiny. As the material contradictions of the economy deepen, marked by joblessness, decaying public utilities, and an underfunded education system, the State’s vocabulary of condemnation must grow increasingly abstract to keep pace. When physical insurgencies can no longer be invoked to explain civic unrest, the State is forced to invent enemies within the human mind.
(Akhilesh Yadav is a Research Scholar, Centre for Historical Studies (CHS), JNU, and Former Vice President of Allahabad University Students' Union. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)