Why 'Dimaagi Naxal' is India's most dangerous label yet | LME 156 | Pooja Prasanna

Dimaagi Naxal

Andolan Jeevi

Tuke tukde Gang

Thanks to our dear Prime Minister Modi and many of his ardent supporters, we have enriched our vocabulary over the years.

Modi himself gave us Dimaagi Naxal and Andolan Jeevi.

The filmmaker who believes facts are not facts -  Vivek Agnihotri gave us Urban Naxals.

Sudhir Chowdhury took a break from his astounding journalism to give us Tukde Tukde Gang.

The term Dimaagi Naxal has been instantly lapped up by friendly media and supporters. With the media even queuing up to ask, Mantriji - yeh dimaagi naxal hai kaun?

People have responded with humour

Some have made Venn diagrams

And there is already a social media handle called Dimaagi Naxal party

While humour is definitely a good way to respond to this venom, we must also be cognizant of the dangers and understand that this is not just rhetoric.

It is the vocabulary of political suspicion.

The latest category is people whose minds are supposedly dangerous — and the dog whistle is that they must be “identified and isolated”.

But who exactly qualifies according to Modi?

What have they done?

What is the evidence?

And where does legitimate criticism end and “dimaagi Naxal” begin?

He does not specify. 

That ambiguity is deliberate.

What Modi has implied and the call for action he has given is not just dangerous but plain malicious.

Let me explain.

When power starts labelling people instead of answering them, staying silent is not an option.

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If you accuse someone of being an armed insurgent or a Naxal, there should be something concrete behind that accusation — their actions, their associations or evidence of what they’ve actually done.

“Dimaagi Naxal” is different.

Now you’re not really talking about what someone has done. You’re talking about what they think. What they believe. Who they’re supposedly influenced by.

And that brings us to a broader political technique.

Take a complicated group of people who disagree with you 

Maybe for completely different reasons. Give them onethreatening name.

Tada. You have created an enemy.

We’ve already seen this with “Urban Naxal.”

The idea was to take the Naxal out of the forest and put him in the city — in universities, journalism, activism, civil society and public debate.

And the important thing about a label like this is that it doesn’t necessarily have to prove anything.

We saw this very clearly around the Bhima Koregaon arrests in 2018, when activists, lawyers and intellectuals were arrested. A major political argument followed over the evidence and the state's allegations.

But once a label like “Urban Naxal” becomes established, the questions change.

Instead of asking: What exactly has this person done?

You start asking: Why are you defending them?

And that is the real power of the label.

It doesn’t have to convince everyone that someone is guilty.

It just has to make association with that person politically dangerous.

And this isn't a new political technique.

Think about McCarthyism in 1950s America.

Senator Joseph McCarthy accused people of being Communists or Communist sympathisers, often without solid evidence. But the accusation itself could be devastating.

You didn't necessarily have to prove that someone was a Communist.

You just had to make people afraid of being associated with one.

And Mao's China gives us an even darker example.

During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, intellectuals and critics were classified as “Rightists”. It became a political identity that could determine how that person was treated.

The times and systems were different.

But you see, the basic political mechanism is the same.

Once political power creates a category of people who are supposedly an internal enemy, suspicion itself becomes powerful.

And we’ve seen this vocabulary grow in India.

Urban Naxal.

Andolan jeevi.

Tukde-tukde gang.

Ghuspaithiye.

Khan Market gang.

Muslim League-Maoist Congress.

Building a solid, evidence-based argument against someone takes time.

So the Prime Minister, who has no time to spare, just creates labels.

That takes a second.

And once the label sticks, that is often what people remember.

Which brings us back to “dimaagi Naxal”.

“Dimaagi Naxal” moves the suspicion into the person's mind.

You don't have to carry a weapon.

You don't have to belong to an organisation.

You don't even have to do anything that can be identified as a crime.

The accusation can simply be that the way you think is dangerous.

And that is why the word “dimaagi” matters.

Because who decides when a political opinion becomes a dangerous thought?

The Prime Minister?

The police?

A television anchor?

A party spokesperson?

Or a social media mob?

Once you create the category, everyone can start policing it.

And you can see how this works with something as ordinary as a student protest.

Say a student says:

“I have questions about how the government handled this examination.”

That’s a political argument.

You can answer it.

You can say: Here is the data. Here is why we made this decision. Here is why we think the student is wrong.

But you can also take a completely different route.

You can say: These students are being manipulated. They’re dimaagi Naxals. Someone is behind them. Someone is poisoning their minds.

And suddenly, we’re not talking about the examination anymore.

We’re talking about the student.

Who are they?

Who are they loyal to?

Who is influencing them?

When students raise uncomfortable questions, you have two choices.

You can engage with the questions.

Or you can just write them away

Writing them away is easier, because that allows young people to be categorised as those who can’t be politically mature.

And when you discredit a person, you don't have to answer them anymore

Dimaagi naxals!

The consequences of a Prime Minister using such language go beyond political rhetoric.

Political language doesn't stay with the person who first uses it.

It travels.

Party leaders, workers, Television anchors, influencers, and Social media accounts will repeat it.

Eventually people start using the label themselves, sometimes without even remembering where it came from.

And then the label can become an atmosphere.

We've seen how dangerous that can be.

Student Neha Bora was attacked for supporting Umar Khalid. The attacker viewed Umar Khalid as an “Urban Naxal”.

Every person who uses a label does not become violent.

The point is that once you repeatedly tell people that certain individuals are enemies of the nation, the distance between political disagreement and personal hostility can become very small.

Gauri Lankesh and M M Kalburgi were also subjected to vicious ideological abuse and branded by sections of the political ecosystem as anti-Hindu, anti-national or “Urban Naxals”.

Again, the language matters.

Because once somebody is turned into an enemy, you don't listen to them in quite the same way.

You start looking at them as a threat.

And that brings us to the most important part of this story.

The Red Fort speech.

Modi is not just another political commentator shouting on television.

When the Prime Minister speaks from the Red Fort on Independence Day, millions of people are listening.

So when the Prime Minister says that a category of people needs to be identified and isolated, we shouldn't simply wave it away as another colourful Modi phrase.

The words matter.

The platform matters.

And the repetition matters.

A political disagreement becomes an identity.

The identity becomes a suspicion.

And the suspicion becomes a question of national loyalty.

That is the political culture these labels create.

And frankly, that should worry people who support Modi as much as people who oppose him.

Because political labels have a nasty habit of outliving the people who invent them.

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Produced by Akshay Lal, script by Pooja Prasanna & Dhanya Rajendran, Edit by Nikhil Sekhar & Jaseem Ali, Camera by Ajay R