Modi's Call to Confront Intellectual Architects of Naxalism Sparks Debate on Insurgency's Ideology

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day address did what Indian political discourse has avoided for four decades. The country measured its war against Naxalism in body counts, arms recoveries and the district maps that turned green from red. What it rarely confronted was the architecture of ideas behind the insurgency. By calling out the dimagi Naxal (intellectual Naxal), Modi has forced a final battle upon the deadliest terror threat to have plagued India. Naxalism was always an ideology before it was a militia. Charu Majumdar, the ideologue of Naxalbari, did not pick up a rifle out of personal deprivation; he theorised, organised and incited others toward armed “revolution”. Naxal leadership across generations has drawn from comfortable, often landed or urban intellectual backgrounds. Naxals seek to overthrow the Republic of India along with its “bourgeois constitution” and establish a communist state in which the class enemies will be liquidated by an armed revolution. These underground Naxals, their overground members and sympathisers believe India is an artificial, illegitimate entity that is denying the right of “self-determination” to different “nationalities” and is working at the behest of international capital. After Operation Green Hunt in 2009, Maoists decided to expand aggressively in urban centres and hide in plain sight by posing as human rights activists, university professors, journalists and even corporate employees. They aim to act as couriers and provide safe houses for cadres of banned outfits, to stall any action against the terror groups, wage an ideological war on the Indian state and undermine it by promoting anarchy. They package their propaganda in acceptable terminology like human rights, Dalit assertion, farmer issues and individual rights. Their aim is ostensibly justice for the marginalised and freedom from hunger and poverty. But they don’t always publicly state that their theoretical framework associates freedom from hunger and poverty or justice with the balkanisation of India. This is a messianic cult masquerading as secular ideology that seeks nothing but death and destruction in search of a promised utopia. The Narendra Modi government’s counter-Naxal doctrine has rested on a triad of security, rehabilitation, and development. Because it worked on the ground, the Naxal intellectual ecosystem shifted its attack to development itself. Nuclear power projects, agricultural modernisation programmes and infrastructure corridors have been opposed not because of genuine local grievances or flaws in the projects themselves, but by a recurring cast of “civil society” groups whose real objection is to the writ of the Indian state. History has a cautionary message that PM Modi’s critics would do well to heed. The first wave of Naxalism, crushed by the mid-1970s, resurfaced two decades later. By the mid-2000s, nearly a third of the country’s territory lay in the Red Corridor. While old ideologues had to organise physically, travel to villages, print pamphlets, and hold clandestine meetings, their successors use smartphones and build a following on Instagram, YouTube and X by monetising a persona built around resistance. The medium has changed, and the incitement is more diffuse, but the function is unchanged: Manufacturing moral cover for anti-state violence and instability. Unfortunately, several others join them because of the allure of woke resistance, or simply for the profit anti-establishment content can generate. They don’t seem to realise what they are supporting. If the Naxals succeed, there will be no freedom or liberty. There will be no police, only party militia. There will be no rule of law or courts, only kangaroo courts. Intellectuals and professors will be sent to labour camps. Why is such bluntness necessary? Because people must know what Naxalism stands for. They must realise the horrors that could be unleashed on the country if they aren’t careful. Governments can be voted out in the next election, but a state, when it collapses, can’t be voted back. The writer is national vice-president, BJP Youth Wing