On August 15, 2026, addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on India’s 80th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered what began as a familiar note of triumphalism. His 75-minute speech revolved around self-reliance, technological power, manufacturing, energy security, defence, youth and the new “Sapta Dhara” strategy. The most striking feature was his repeated invocation of Atmanirbharta, despite its glaring contradiction: his government’s deepening India’s integration into the US-led economic and strategic order. In February 2026, he agreed to intend to purchase $500 billion of US goods over five years – energy, aircraft, technology and other products. The speech also treated self-reliance as a matter of will. But technological and economic autonomy requires institutions, human capital, research, education, labour rights, domestic demand, technological ecosystems and bargaining power – not empty exhortation.Equally striking was the avalanche of statistics: electronic manufacturing ‘up seven-fold,’ rail coach output ‘up 21 times’ — that carefully avoided the less flattering aggregate: manufacturing’s share of India’s GDP has fallen to around 13%, its lowest point in over 60 years of data, even as the government marked its 13th consecutive Independence Day address with a newly unveiled ‘Shakti Ki Saptadhara’, his penchant for such illusive sanskari phrases. Yet, a report card of outputs is not an assessment of the nation. The speech scarcely asked who gained or lost, what remained unfinished, or how India fares on employment, wages, agrarian distress, inequality, education, malnutrition, caste discrimination, communal polarisation, institutional erosion, civil liberties or press freedom, which is all time low today. And finally, his repeated invocation of “Viksit Bharat by 2047” conveniently pushes accountability beyond his political horizon. The people have given him a five-year mandate, not a 21-one-year exemption from accountability. The speech offered grandiose horizons where the present demanded answers.‘Dimagi Naxal’Among the full blown rhetoric about the performance, one thing stuck out: Naxalism, he said, had once “drenched the earth in blood,” holding a large part of the country hostage “at the barrel of a gun” for four decades. He announced, not for the first time, that his government had all but finished the job: “we have been able to curb and free the country from ‘hathiyariya naxal’ (armed naxal).” It was the sentence that followed which turned an anniversary speech into a national controversy. “But the ‘dimagi naxal’ (people with naxal thinking) are looking for an opportunity, looking to see ways of violence, and trying to drag the country to a wrong path,” the prime minister said, calling for such people to be “identified and isolated.” He added, by way of explanation, that for years “individuals harbouring Maoist ideologies had entrenched themselves within the corridors of power… through their roles as advisors on government committees,” and that this “Maoist mindset” had shaped policymaking across institutions. Within hours, the phrase “dimagi naxal” was the most argued-over two words in Indian politics.The BJP’s obsession with the term “Naxal” has deeper ideological roots in the RSS worldview articulated by M.S. Golwalkar in Bunch of Thoughts, which identified three supposed internal enemies of the nation: Muslims, Christians and communists. The first two have a long history of political exploitation, with Muslims in particular serving during the past 12 years as a potent instrument of communal polarisation and political consolidation. The third has been invoked through the spectre of Maoist violence, made particularly convenient by the earlier official description of Naxalism as the “biggest internal security threat” to India. None of this justifies violence. But the principle cannot be applied selectively to those resisting state power. When the state itself uses violence to suppress legitimate demands, dispossess people and devastate their lives in order to transfer natural resources to corporations, it becomes a principal generator of the conditions in which popular violence arises.Yet, Modi’s tone and body language were, as usual, belligerent. As prime minister, he was expected to address the people on Independence Day in the established tradition: present an account of his government’s performance, explain the shortfall in fulfilling promises made to the people, present his vision for the coming year – not 21 years hence – and outline policies to address the problems confronting the country. Instead, he used the occasion, as he habitually does, to defend his government against a manufactured enemy. There was little serious engagement with the mounting problems of unemployment, the rupee’s decline, allegations of pervasive corruption, the closure of public schools, or the epidemic of examination-paper leaks. Rather than speaking to the anxieties of citizens, he spoke as though he were confronting an adversary, and the adversary, implicitly, was anyone who questioned his government, particularly the Gen Z and Gen Alpha now finding their political voice.A threat, not a sloganHis abstract phrase about “dimagi Naxals” triggered instant reaction across the country. He offered no criterion by which a citizen could know, in advance, whether their own opinions placed them inside or outside the category he had just created. The phrase “dimagi Naxal” echoes the politically charged label “urban Naxal,” a term Modi and leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have used for years for activists, academics and other critics of the government. It became the operative logic behind the 2018 Bhima Koregaon arrests, in which poets, lawyers, professors and human-rights defenders were arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) on the theory that they had a link to a banned Maoist conspiracy. One of these 16 arrestees, Father Stan Swamy, 84 years old and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, died in judicial custody in 2021 without ever being convicted and Surendra Gadling, a human rights lawyer from Nagpur is still in jail in his ninth year. The label “tukde tukde gang” — coined after a disputed 2016 JNU campus event and applied since to student activists, journalists and, at various points, entire university departments — followed the same pattern: a term with no legal definition, deployed with the practical effect of a legal one. “Andolanjeevi” — professional agitator — was the label Modi reached for during the 2020–21 farmers’ protests, aimed at anyone who supported a movement that eventually forced the repeal of three farm laws. He even insulted the agitating farmers as “Khalistanis”. Each label began as a rhetorical flourish in a speech and ended up doing real work in FIRs, passport denials, foreign-funding cancellations under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act and prolonged pre-trial detention.Seen against that history, “dimagi naxal” was not a new idea. It was the same instrument, sharpened and generalised. Where ”urban Naxal” at least gestured toward an alleged organisational link to Maoist networks, “dimagi naxal” locates the offence entirely inside a person’s thinking — a mindset, a species of influence on institutions and committees, requiring no act, no association, no evidence beyond the state’s own judgment that a person’s ideas are unwelcome.The government’s retreat and what it revealsThe reaction was immediate and came from across the opposition spectrum, from Congress to the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram responded by declaring himself proud to be called a “dimagi Naxal,” a rhetorical judo move that dared the government to say, explicitly, whether ordinary political opposition now qualified for the label. It reminded of the late Girish Karnad wearing a placard announcing “Me to Urban Naxal”.Facing a “storm” that had spread through Sunday morning news cycles, the government moved to contain the damage. Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Kiren Rijiju posted a clarification on X: “PM @narendramodi ji didn’t say opposition leaders as Dimagi Naxals. Only following are Dimagi Naxals: 1. Who support Maoists and reject Indian Constitution. 2. Who stand with separatists & support Article 370. 3. Who want to cut chicken neck to separate North-East from India.” This was a poor and dishonest explanation as there was no such context in the prime minister’s speech. Notwithstanding, Rijiju’s clarification does little to resolve the problem. Intellectual support for, or critical engagement with, the struggles of oppressed people or regions cannot simply be stretched by the government into equivalence with unlawful activity and used to incarcerate people for years without trial. That is precisely the danger of turning a political epithet into a quasi-legal category. As for his inclusion of support for Article 370, the law has taken a position expressly contrary to his contention, as the Supreme Court judgment discussed in the following section makes clear. Rijiju’s formulation thus risks repeating the logic of the earlier “urban Naxal” label: stigmatise dissenting thought by conflating intellectual disagreement with criminal subversion. The Article 370 problem Article 370 was, for 70 years, a provision of that same Constitution — the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, altered by presidential order and Parliamentary resolution only in August 2019. Millions of Indian citizens – including former chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir who took their oath of office under it, elected representatives of national parties, and constitutional lawyers who argue on entirely textual grounds that the 2019 abrogation was procedurally flawed – have held and continue to hold the view that Article 370 should not have been read down, or that the manner of its reading down was constitutionally infirm. To place the mere advocacy of that position — a position about the Constitution, argued on constitutional grounds, in Parliament, in courts, and in op-eds — in the same sentence as support for armed insurgency and territorial secession is not a narrowing of the prime minister’s warning. It is among the clearest illustrations available of exactly the danger critics identified in the original phrase: that a broad, undefined charge of “wrong thinking” can be extended, almost accidentally, to cover a mainstream constitutional argument simply because it is inconvenient to the government of the day.This is not a hypothetical concern invented for the purposes of this column. The Supreme Court has already had occasion to say, in terms directly relevant here, that dissent or expression of views different from the opinion of the government cannot be termed as seditious — a principle it applied in 2021 when it dismissed a petition seeking action against former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah for publicly stating his opposition to the abrogation of Article 370. If the Court has already held that a sitting political leader cannot be prosecuted merely for opposing the 2019 decision, then a Cabinet minister’s own list explicitly naming “support for Article 370” as a marker of a Naxal mindset — intended, no less, as an act of clarification and reassurance — sits uneasily with the Court’s own settled position.What the constitution actually permitsArticle 19(1)(a) of the Constitution guarantees every citizen the freedom of speech and expression. That freedom is not absolute — Article 19(2) permits the state to impose “reasonable restrictions” in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, public order, and a handful of other specified grounds. But the word “reasonable” has never been treated by Indian courts as an invitation to the executive to draw the boundary wherever convenient. In the foundational sedition judgment Kedar Nath Singh v. State of Bihar (1962), the Supreme Court read down Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code precisely because an unrestricted reading would criminalise ordinary criticism of the government; it held that only speech with a direct incitement to violence or public disorder could be punished, and that “strong words” of disapprobation of government measures, however vigorously expressed, remained within the citizen’s constitutional right. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), the Court struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act on the specific ground that it’s vague and overbroad language — criminalising speech that caused “annoyance” or “inconvenience” — had an impermissible chilling effect on protected expression, regardless of whether it was ever actually enforced against a particular critic.That is the constitutional test that any phrase like “dimagi naxal” has to be measured against — not whether the prime minister or his ministers intend, in good faith, to apply it narrowly, but whether the phrase itself, left undefined in a nationally broadcast address, functions in the way Section 66A and unrestrained sedition prosecutions have historically functioned: as an instrument whose deterrent power lies precisely in its vagueness. A journalist, an academic, a student organiser, or an NGO worker does not need to be formally charged to feel its effect. They need only calculate, correctly, that criticising the government’s policy on a mining project, a farm law, an internet shutdown, or a constitutional amendment now carries a marginally higher risk of being folded into a category the state has reserved the right to define after the fact.Mounting challenge from childrenNone of this can be understood in isolation from the moment in which it was said. The speech came only weeks after the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)’s youth-led protests had shaken the government sufficiently to force the resignation of a Cabinet minister – the most significant grassroots challenge Modi’s government has faced from young, urban and digitally organised Indians in more than a decade. It came in the same season as the Jharkhand examination aspirants’ protest, which was met with tear gas and a controversial midnight visit to the protest site. Read against this backdrop, the “dimaagi Naxal” formulation looks less like an isolated rhetorical flourish about a decades-old insurgency than an attempt to pre-emptively frame the next wave of youth dissent, whatever form it may take, as ideologically suspect before it has fully emerged. A government that has just witnessed a leaderless, meme-driven youth movement force it to yield has an obvious institutional incentive to narrow the boundaries of legitimate protest – and to have the vocabulary for doing so ready in advance.Modi faces a larger challenge ahead. The CJP has already announced its next phase of agitation under the slogan “Schools Thik Karo” (Fix the Schools), reinforcing the growing Gen Alpha mobilisation over the deteriorating condition of public schools. The agitation is also drawing attention to what appears to be a systematic policy push towards shrinking the public-school system and creating greater space for private capital – at the cost of excluding large numbers of poor children from education. By bringing this reality into public view, the movement threatens to turn a seemingly administrative issue into a broader political question. Modi’s speech conspicuously evaded these concerns while insinuating that such unrest could be delegitimised as anti-national activity – his familiar political refrain. He must understand that post-Jantar Mantar India has dispelled that fear.ConclusionIndia’s Constitution does not ask its citizens to agree with their government. It asks only that they not incite violence or threaten the security of the state while disagreeing with it. Everything short of that line — including opposing Article 370’s abrogation, arguing for its restoration, criticising a mining policy, marching against an examination scandal, or simply thinking that the government’s economic diplomacy has surrendered more than it has gained — remains, on the plain text of Article 19 and seven decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence, an exercise of a fundamental right, not a symptom to be “identified and isolated.” A government confident in the argument for its own policies should welcome the sharpest scrutiny a “dimagi” citizen can offer. It is only a government uncertain of winning that argument on the merits that needs, instead, to redefine the argument itself as a form of insurgency.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.