When the Prime Minister used the term Dimagi Naxal in his Independence Day speech at the Red Fort, the immediate reaction came from expected segments, along expected lines. Television debates and social media posts quickly shifted to Freedom of Speech, political labelling, and the shrinking space for dissent. The argument became whether the phrase was acceptable rather than what kind of security problem the PM was trying to describe. The term may be politically loaded, but the underlying concern is true: armed insurgencies can lose territory and manpower while surviving through networks of influence, recruitment, propaganda, and political mobilisation. Putting the political rhetoric aside for a moment, it is time to examine the idea from an internal security perspective.
Survival Tactics: Armed Insurgencies
For this, one has to stop thinking about politics and start looking at how armed insurgencies survive when they are losing physical ground. General Bipin Rawat talked about the internal threat vectors years ago when he outlined what the security establishment calls a 0.5 front. People usually focus on the two-front war with Pakistan and China, but the half front inside our own borders has always been the tricky and more worrisome part. For decades, that half front was split into distinct operational chunks. We had the armed Naxals in the Red Corridor from Chhattisgarh to Jharkhand, and also had OGWs in Kashmir managing the separatist network. Security forces have reduced the Maoist armed cadres down to a few shrinking pockets, and the abrogation of Art 370 in Kashmir cleaned up a lot of the old bureaucratic and political cover that separatists relied on. Though the physical fronts are collapsing, insurgencies usually don’t vanish. They mutate.
This process of mutation is no guesswork. You can read the strategy documents that the CPI Maoist organisation had put out over the years. Look at papers like Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution. The Joint CC of the erstwhile CPI (ML)(PW) and the MCCI finalised this document in September 2004 after extensive discussions and by consolidating points from 5 draft documents. These documents lay out a clear, pragmatic plan and openly discuss building a united front, creating front organisations, and infiltrating civil society, universities, legal networks, and media spaces. This exemplifies the core idea that the people with guns in the forests cannot win unless they have a sophisticated intellectual, financial, and legal shield operating in the cities. That urban network is what came to be called “urban Naxalism.” But over the last few years, even that physical network of NGOs and localised cells has faced intense pressure from investigative agencies. So the movement adapted again. It moved entirely into the cognitive domain. That is where the Dimagi Naxal lives.
Dimagi Naxal: Disruptive Methodology
A Dimagi Naxal is not necessarily someone carrying a red card or passing money to underground fighters. He/She is an intellectual, a commentator, an academic, or a digital creator who operates entirely within the legal boundaries of the system to wage ideological warfare. Their job is to weaponise genuine societal grievances. Every country has problems, including economic inequality, administrative failure, localised friction, and institutional strain. A Dimagi Naxal does not look at the solutions to fix these problems. They treat them as raw material to build a permanent narrative of systemic illegitimacy.
When the National Security Advisor and other top intelligence figures talk about the threat of cognitive warfare, this is what they mean. Part of modern fourth generation warfare, It is based on the core thought that why destroy bridges or blow up power grids if it can convince a generation of young people that their entire country is fundamentally illegitimate, oppressive, and beyond saving. The strategy is to erode trust from the inside out. We must understand how information flows online in the digital era. If we spend time on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or X, we can experience how algorithms get milked. A real incident, maybe an administrative lapse or a social dispute, and immediately a coordinated web of accounts amplifies it with extreme hostility. The language is designed to provoke anger, disgust, and alienation. Over time, constant exposure to this curated negativity alters how people process reality. You stop seeing an administrative failure that needs a policy fix, and you start seeing proof of a broken state that deserves to be torn down. How these algorithms amplified CJP protest and how it muted the Jharkhand students protest is the most recent example.o
This brings us back to why mocking the term is a tactical error. Whenever the government or security agencies name this phenomenon, critics immediately jump in to claim that the state is trying to criminalize policy debate. That very defence mechanism is built into the Maoist urban strategy documents. The manuals explicitly instruct cadres to hide behind democratic rights, human rights platforms, and intellectual freedom whenever the state tries to close in on their front organisations. They use the openness of a democratic system as armour while working to subvert that exact system.
The phrase “Dimagi Naxal” may have political baggage, but the security question behind it should not be dismissed simply because the terminology is controversial
When people laugh off the phrase as political slang, they miss how internal subversion operates today. There is no longer any need for an underground printing press to spread revolutionary pamphlets when mainstream opinion makers and digital influencers do the same ideological work under the banner of neutral commentary.
When the prime minister highlighted this issue, it was a rare public acknowledgment of a security threat that usually stays buried in classified intelligence briefs. The internal security apparatus has known for a long time that the most stubborn part of the Naxal problem was never the tribal youth holding a rifle in the jungle, but the urban ideologue providing the intellectual justification for that violence while sitting comfortably in an air conditioned room.
In the coming years, this cognitive front will expand. With advances in Artificial Intelligence, deepfakes, and automated bot networks, manipulating public perception is easier and cheaper than ever. Foreign adversaries do not need to fund direct insurgencies when they can piggyback on domestic ideological networks already eager to tear down the country’s constitutional fabric.
Protesters opposing legislation are exercising a constitutional right. Political parties are expected to attack governments. These are normal features of a democracy. The distinction lies in the intent and the method. Legitimate dissent aims to reform and strengthen the system. Dimagi Naxalism aims to delegitimise the state entirely and foster permanent social fracture.
The phrase Dimagi Naxal” may have political baggage, but the security question behind it should not be dismissed simply because the terminology is controversial. India has spent decades dealing with insurgencies that combined violence with political mobilisation and propaganda. The methods available to hostile actors have now changed dramatically.
