On India’s 80th Independence Day, speaking from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Prime Minister Modi cautioned the nation against a new adversary, the “dimagi Naxal” or Naxal mindset. The phrase joins an expanding political lexicon that has produced “urban Naxal”, “Andolanjeevis”, “Khan Market gang”, “tukde-tukde gang”, among others.These labels derive much of their force from the chaos of the media ecosystem, though their real potency lies in their elasticity. They require neither legal precision nor a clearly defined adversary and can be stretched to accommodate almost anyone who dissents, protests, questions or refuses to conform. The vocabulary blurs disagreement with suspicion and suspicion with hostility.A day after the speech, Union Minister Kiren Rijiju took to social media to supply the skeletal definition wherein dimagi Naxals were those who support Maoists and reject the constitution, those who stand with separatists and support Article 370 and those who advocate cutting off the “chicken’s neck”, the land link between the northeastern states and the rest of the country.The advanced clarification of what dimagi Naxal means does little to resolve the problem of elasticity. Placing Maoist insurgency alongside a political position on Article 370, which occupies a completely different legal, constitutional and political terrain, reveals the problem with such elastic and politically charged words.There are precedents of such ambiguity. On March 11, 2020, the Minister of State for Home Affairs G. Kishan Reddy responded to a question asked by Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Shanta Chhetri. The question was: “whether the ministry has defined what constitutes ‘urban Naxal’ and its definition, who falls under this category of ‘urban Naxal’.” And the minister had responded, “The phrase ‘urban Naxals’ is not used by the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.”Also read: Why ‘Urban Naxals’ Are DangerousAgain, on December 20, 2022, a similar question was raised in Lok Sabha and the government’s response did not provide any definition.Such charged words rarely have a fixed meaning because their power lies precisely in never defining the ambiguous. Such linguistic subterfuge follows the three-S formula: Simplify, Stigmatise and Silence. Once a dissenter can be dismissed as an urban Naxal or dimagi Naxal, the substance of any criticism against the dominant view is instantly made irrelevant, since the label does the argumentative work. This is where Orwellian dystopian fiction becomes relevant.The fact and fiction of language instrumentalisedIn George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, political domination extends beyond controlling institutions to controlling the vocabulary through which the masses understand those institutions. Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, was devised to serve the ideological needs of Ingsoc, the ruling party. Its purpose was not merely to censor, but to progressively narrow the range of thought: if the language to articulate dissent disappeared, dissent itself would become harder to formulate.Thus, ‘goodthink’ denoted only those thoughts sanctioned by the party, while ‘crimethink’ collapsed the entire spectrum of doubt, disagreement and independent judgment into a single category of ideological deviance, already suspect, already guilty for the ‘thinkpol’ (thought police), trained to surveil and read disloyalty off a person’s face before it ever reached their mouth.The German philologist Victor Klemperer also arrived at a similar understanding through his survival during the rise of Nazi Germany, when he lost his academic position under racial laws in 1935. Klemperer maintained a secret diary, later developed into LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich), published in 1947. In his diary, he recorded how ordinary words were narrowed, inverted and charged with ideological meaning until language itself began to absorb the regime’s logic.Over twelve years of Nazi rule, Klemperer watched the word fanatisch meaning fanatical, undergo a remarkable inversion. To be a ‘fanatical’ follower of Hitler was to be understood as virtuous. Volk meaning ‘the people’, was transformed into a closed racial community. The transformation was through relentless repetition. It is the mechanism itself: taking an existing word and detaching its emotional force while changing what it is meant.Also read: The Chief Justice Called Them Cockroaches. History Knows Where That Language Leads.Dimagi Naxal bears a striking resemblance to this kind of shorthand. It compresses an entire accusation emerging from a complex range of arguments and political positions into two words, that suggest “dangerous mindset”. The result is a category in which the alleged offence may no longer be a demonstrable act or an identifiable organisation, but an allegedly dangerous mindset, akin to Newspeak, acting like an antibiotic for the dissent bug.Distinguishing Naxalism from dissentNaxalism has a specific historical and socio-economic genealogy. It emerged from Naxalbari in 1967, from agrarian inequality and conflict. Its subsequent manifestation across parts of rural and tribal India cannot be understood without reference to land, resources, displacement and failure of development and rehabilitation. It happened in specific places, for specific reasons, carried out by identifiable people doing identifiable things.The Naxal was an armed insurgent; the urban Naxal was manufactured as an alleged associate; the dimagi Naxal risks becoming a category of mind, someone who simply carries dissent or thinks differently from the current dispensation.Dystopia, on Klemperer’s evidence as much as on Orwell’s imagination, rarely begins with a sudden seizure of power. It begins when political vocabulary is permitted to replace the work of evidence and argument, making it easier to label a mindset than to answer a grievance. India is not Orwell’s Oceania, nor is it Klemperer’s Dresden. In a constitutional democracy, dissent ought to be argued, not diagnosed with a limited vocabulary that cannot clearly define it.Rishav Sharma is a legal practitioner based in Delhi.