Arise Bharat

Col Ajay Kumar (Retd)

When the Prime Minister used the term “Dimagi Naxal” in his Independence Day speech at the Red Fort, the immediate reaction was from expected segments on the expected lines. Television debates and social media postings moved quickly to freedom of speech, political labeling and the shrinking space for dissent. The argument became about whether the phrase was acceptable rather than what kind of security problem the PM was trying to describe. The term may be interpreted as politically loaded, but the underlying concern is true,  armed insurgencies can lose territory and manpower while continuing to survive 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 the perspective of internal security.

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 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 abrogation of Art 370 Kashmir cleaned up a lot of the old bureaucratic and political cover that separatists relied on. Though the  physical fronts are collapsing. But insurgencies usually don’t vanish. They mutate.

This process of mutation is no guesswork. One can read the actual strategy documents put out by the CPI Maoist organization over the years. Look at papers like Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution. This document was finalised by Joint CC of the erstwhile CPI (ML)(PW) and the MCCI in September 2004 after extensive discussions and consolidating points from 5 draft documents.  or their specific guidelines on work in urban areas as contained in OUR WORK IN URBAN AREAS. These documents lay out a clear, pragmatic plan and  talks openly about building a united front, creating front organizations, and infiltrating civil society, universities, legal networks, and media spaces. This exemplifies the core idea thatthe 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 localized 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.

A Dimagi Naxal is not necessarily someone carrying a red card or passing money to underground fighters. He/Sheis 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 weaponize genuine societal grievances. Every country has problems, including economic inequality, administrative failure, localized friction, and institutional strain. A DimagiNaxal does not look at the solutions to fix these problems. They look at them as raw material to construct 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 digital era. If we spend time on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or X, we can experience how algorithms get milked. A real incident, maybe a 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, we can all relate with.  It has demonstrated that recommendation algorithms reward emotional and abusive content. Outrage travels easily. Artificial intelligence can produce convincing synthetic images, audio and video at very low cost.

That changes the operating environment for both domestic and foreign influence operations.

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 organizations. They use the openness of a democratic system as armour while working to subvert that exact system.

When people laugh off the phrase as political slang, they are missing the mechanics of how internal subversion actually operates today. There no more is any need of an underground printing press to spread revolutionary pamphlets when there are mainstream opinion makers and digital influencers doing the same ideological work under the banner of neutral commentary.

A close look at how certain narratives are manufactured in the media and academic spaces will give publications or public intellectuals who manage to frame every single national event, whether it is economic growth, scientific achievement, or infrastructure expansion, through a lens of unmitigated failure. At the same time, localized or regional friction gets blown up to maximum proportions to drive wedges between different linguistic or regional groups. This is not normal editorial critique but a systematic exercise in narrative control.

The people driving these narratives understand the power of perception. They know that if they can capture the minds of the educated urban youth, they control the future leadership of the institutions, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the media. That is why the battleground has shifted from the forests of Dandakaranya to the classrooms of elite universities and the comment sections of social media.

Israel is often cited as a classic example of a nation surrounded entirely by external enemies. But India has a different internal reality. We face external pressure from two hostile neighbours combined on our borders, but we also host an internal ecosystem of ideological actors who actively root for our strategic failure on the global stage. They are the termites in the wooden structure.

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 coming times, this cognitive front is going to expand. With advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and automated bot networks, manipulating public perception is easier and cheaper than ever before. Foreign adversaries do not need to fund direct insurgencies when they can piggyback on domestic ideological networks that are already eager to tear down the constitutional fabric of the country.

Recognizing this threat does not mean shutting down legitimate policy disagreements. Democratic criticism is not an internal security threat. Journalists questioning the government are not automatically security risks. Academics challenging official policy are not insurgents. 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. DimagiNaxalism aims to delegitimize 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.

The challenge for the security establishment is to recognise that change without turning ordinary democratic disagreement into a security offence.

If we as citizens, keep pretending that every internal security warning is just a political trick, we are going to wake up too late. The battle for India’s security is no longer just being fought with bullets and boundary patrols. It is being fought in the minds of citizens who are being taught to despise their own country one notification at a time. Unless we learn to recognize and counter that cognitive subversion, the half front inside our borders will do more damage than any external army ever could.