Naxalism was never merely a gun in the jungle. For decades, it survived as an ecosystem. The Maoist with an assault rifle was its visible hardware. But behind that hardware existed a sophisticated ideological software: activists, intellectuals, lawyers and political sympathisers who repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the State’s response, romanticised revolutionary violence, opposed development projects in conflict zones and often converted the fight against a brutal insurgency into a morality play in which the State was perpetually cast as the villain.

This is the phenomenon Prime Minister Narendra Modi has described as the “Dimaagi Naxal.” The phrase deserves serious examination because the phenomenon is not new. Its vocabulary has evolved, its protagonists have changed and its methods have become more sophisticated. But the underlying instinct remains remarkably consistent: distrust the State, delegitimise its institutions, obstruct development and, whenever confronted with the consequences, shift attention from the violence of the insurgent to the supposed sins of the State. Of course, criticism of government policy is legitimate and indispensable in a democracy.

But there is a profound difference between dissent and an ideological ecosystem that appears instinctively hostile to the country’s institutions, security apparatus and developmental ambitions. That is where dissent ends and the Dimaagi Naxal begins. For decades, India’s security forces fought an enemy that had perfected violence against some of India’s poorest citizens. Maoists blew up roads, attacked police stations, killed elected representatives, extorted contractors, destroyed schools and intimidated villagers who refused to cooperate. Yet the insurgency survived partly because its violence was accompanied by an ecosystem outside the forest.

The Supreme Court’s 2011 judgment on Salwa Judum is an important part of this complicated history. Petitioners including Nandini Sundar and others challenged the State’s handling of the counter-insurgency campaign, and the Court directed the State to desist from using tribal youth as armed Special Police Officers against Maoists. The Court’s concerns about constitutional governance and human rights must be respected. But another question also deserves to be asked: when the State’s counter-insurgency architecture is dismantled or delegitimised, who fills the vacuum? The Maoists do.

That is the paradox India has often struggled to articulate. A State fighting an armed insurgency must itself remain bound by law. But a democracy cannot afford a moral framework in which the violence of the insurgent becomes almost invisible while every action of the State is subjected to infinitely greater scrutiny. The Maoists understo o d this asymmetry. They supplied the hardware. Their ideological ecosystem supplied the software. Dr Binayak Sen became one of the most prominent faces of this debate.

His........

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