This Independence Day, India's prime minister, made a strategic shift in branding the minders of India's nearly six decades old Maoist insurgency as "dimagi" Naxals. For those rattled, the choice of word was well-calibrated to deliver home the intended message. For a little over a decade now, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party government has divided India's Maoists into urban Naxals and their jungle Raj, in strategic terms, the city upstarts, who could well be anybody, a public intellectual or a pseudo social media pretender, opposing his government; and the illiterate but highly motivated forest-dwelling indigenous militia that has been used as cannon fodder by their ideologues to wage a relentless war against the state that has been 70 years in the making, irrespective of which party manages the government in Delhi.
So why this shift now?
Since coming to power, Modi and his cohorts have been waging a violent and decisive paramilitary campaign against the forest dwelling insurgents, almost decimating their tracts, to hand over prime mineral and industrial resources to the oligarchs who patronize his party. Yet, Team Modi has failed to neutralise their sophisticated urban minders who dominate the social media space. Which is to say that the King stands naked, fighting a no-holds-barred war in which his own intellectual faculty is constantly challenged. Hence, this dimagi nuisance.
For the uninitiated, Modi fired his bullet, from the Red Fort rampart on August 15, where it should have hurt the most, at a twenty-something social media mascot, Neha Bora, also a PhD scholar at JNU, and National President of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), affiliated with the Naxal outfit, and there are many, the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation, CPI(ML) Liberation, for short. Modi's slur invited public derision. But for the Gen Z comrades, it was their moment of glory. For "dimagi" grants them a modicum of respect as 'intellectual' insurgents rather than murderous toxic disruptors that they are actually programmed to become. How true is that?
Dimagi Naxals is best understood as a metaphor for another widely understood Hindi term "dimagi keera," an ideas insect, so to speak, that drills a wormhole into the mind with disastrous consequences, not for those who advocate confrontation, the educated upstarts, but for those who wage the real weary war of attrition, as forest fodder. It is a "time-tested" tactic that was first experimented in a godforsaken hamlet, Naxalbari, late in the 1960s. Hence, Naxal.
Naxalbari sits on a narrow tract of land, 50 km (37 miles) long and 22 km (14 miles) wide, 79 km (49 miles) to the south of Doklam (near Nathula in Sikkim) where, nine years ago, India engaged in a standoff with the People's Liberation Army of China. Because of its strategic vulnerability, wedged by Nepal, Bangladesh and China, this corridor is called the Chicken’s Neck. An assault on the strip threatens to cut off heartland India from its headland comprising the seven northeastern sister states that China seeks to control. Starting with India's defeat to China in the 1962 War, but more so now, Chicken's Neck has been home to the Indian Army's 33 Corp, and two Airforce stations, one deep in the forest, lately the base for India's deep strike second Rafale Squadron. Let me take you there.
Flash back to 9 December 1971: We packed our luggage to board the Assam Mail to Siliguri where my father was being posted as station head of the "network" he worked for, to tackle a sinister subversion being masterminded in Peking. I was a little boy then. The Naxal Agitation had just taken wings at Naxalbari, next door to Siliguri, under the stewardship of three charismatic comrades -- Jangal Santhal, the indigenous tribal head, not given to propaganda pamphlets, who would fetch the forest fire only to leave behind the wasted embers of a distant delusion; Kanu Sanyal, a tea garden muscleman eventually betrayed by his own beliefs; and the charismatic comrade Charu Majumdar, the near mythical progenitor of Modi's dimagi Naxal who would drill such a fine wormhole to a parallel Universe that his Utopia survives in Naxal imagination to this day, only outsmarted by the lure of al-Lah's paradise of wealth, wine and women, fundamental to Islamic jihad.
My father was assigned to Siliguri for good reason. Months earlier, he had busted a Naxal ring at the Allahabad University campus, the movement's first "surgical strike" into the Hindi heartland. As it turned out, KP Singh, their leader, had been my father’s varsity mate at the same campus a quarter century ago. Now, ideologically pitted against each other, Singh was sworn to Maoism, to tear the State apart; my father, at the other pole of the ideological spectrum, was sworn to tighten the chord that held his nation together.
Singh's arrest was prominent enough to be formally registered, documented, and later raised in official Indian parliamentary proceedings regarding the state's countermeasures against Naxal insurgency. He was a big enough trophy to warrant the pursuit of the biggest catch of them all: Majumdar.
We arrived in Siliguri late on a winter night, days ahead of the liberation of Bangladesh. The Naxals knew we were moving in and threatened us by hurling a country bomb at the station wagon sent to pick us up. Hours later, we reached our "guest house" in the complete darkness of a countywide night curfew ahead of the Indian Army's dash to Dacca.
Seven months into Baba's assignment, Naxalism's founder, Charu Majumdar, was arrested from a safe house in Calcutta, on 16 July 1972, following an intercepted letter to his wife in Siliguri. Majumdar died in custody at the Lal Bazar police headquarters 12 days later. Baba never told us if he had a hand in intercepting that letter. But he left behind a crucial piece of evidence: The Little Red Book, that I recently discovered, a good two decades after he was gone.
What we knew then, for consolation, half a century ago, was that Baba had rehabilitated several indoctrinated youngsters from Charu's cadre to settle into decent livelihoods. Hoina, the smartest of the lot, turned out to be a local don, bartering Chinese wares, mostly Hero mouth organs, Wing Sung ink pens, porcelain soup bowls, and Zebra mosquito coils, for Bay of Bengal cowrie shells, in great demand for Chinese medicine, at the Hong Market, a notorious smuggling entrepot in town. For us in Siliguri, Naxalbari's stench gave way to the fragrance of Makaibari next door, garden for the world's best Darjeeling tea, its golden flowery orange pekoe more inviting than Peking. Charu was soon forgotten, but not his mission. Naxalism survived among the committed, and the "oppressed" in middle India. Over the years, we shifted stations... until last month, when I revisited that heady past, rummaging through my father's left-behinds, around the time Modi, upstaged by the "Gen Z revolt," was coining the "dimagi" slander.
There, yellowing in a mist of musty papers, I dug out Mao's Little Red Book that inspired the Cultural Revolution of 1966, exactly 60 years ago, and instigated Charu's Red Revolution a year later. To ignite his revolt, Majumdar committed to paper his revision of the Buddha's "Eightfold Path," scribbling down his "Historic Eight Documents," that regurgitated Mao's doctrine of forever Peoples' War. Along rose the Naxal battle cry: "Chin'er Chairman amader Chairman: China's Chairman is our Chairman," to the call of which, an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 radical youth were slaughtered by the state at peak insurgency from 1970 to 1972; with twice as many, at 7,000 to 10,000, mowed down till date.
The Red Book that Baba left behind in our family chest is the First Edition Bengali translation titled Sabhapati Mao Tse-Tung'er Udhriti, (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, which is the title of the English edition), published in 1968 by the Foreign Languages Publication of the Chinese People's Republic at Peking, two years after the original imprint in Chinese. Google Gemini tells me that my cover should quote a reserve price of £3,500 at Christie's or Bonham's because of both its rarity and legacy.
My father did not leave behind a note if his studiously underlined book belonged to Charu Majumdar himself, whose intercepted letter to his wife in Siliguri had yielded his hideout in Calcutta around the time The Book landed in his collection. What we know is that Majumdar's wooden home was not far from where we lived bang opposite to the Siliguri College where once, as a student leader, he had picked up the call: "Losers of the World Unite," here neatly printed on the opening page of Mao's Book. Majumdar's son, Abhijeet, now chairs the English department at that college while also officiating as the West Bengal state secretary and Central Committee member of the CPI-ML (Liberation), of which, 29-year-old Neha Bora is the GenZ mascot, and target of the Prime Minister's Independence Day rebuke.
From Naxal to dimagi Naxal has been one "Long March" then, the guiding philosophy still intact in my Little Red Book that starts with a cellophane protected tinted photo of Mao, followed by Marshall Lin Biao's calligraphic call to action: "Read Chairman Mao's book, Listen to Chairman Mao, Work to the orders of Chairman Mao." Mao purged Lin in 1971. He ordered a mass recall of The Red Book, tore up Lin Biao's endorsements, and recirculated it among the masses, making my heirloom copy extremely rare; perhaps the only odd exception in Bengali language to survive the purge.
The Book has 33 chapters, a sacred number in eastern mysticism; its third chapter deliberates on "correctly determining the inner doubts of citizens;" the eighth on "mass warfare;" the ninth on "mass militia;" the fifteenth on "three important objectives (another mystic signpost);" the nineteenth on "revolutionary fervour;" the twenty-first on "hard struggle and self-reliance;" the twenty-third on "investigation, critical thinking, and ideological correction;" the twenty-sixth on "discipline;" the twenty-seventh on criticism and self-evaluation," the twenty-ninth on "cadre;" the thirtieth on "youth;" and the thirty-first on "women."
The Little Red Book should make the perfect ideological manual for Mod's Saffron Stormtroopers as they take on the dimagi remnants among the "Losers of the World," for whom it was once meant to be The Holy Bible.
Here's why...
The Red Book starts with a deep dive into indoctrination, motivation and discipline that has survived as Chinese statecraft well into the twenty-first century. This is also the reason why it makes compelling reading into the Chinese Politburo's collective mindset, long after it discarded Chairman Mao: "War," the Red Book says, "is the episodic revelation of politics."
"War is the highest expression of confrontation to resolve contests between one strata of society and another, one nation and another, one political formation and another."
It also famously asserts that "political power flows from the barrel of the gun"
Hence, "the Highest Revolution demands the capture of political power," in which, "the multitude of manual labourers can defeat the bourgeois and numerous landlords with the power of the gun alone. The gun alone can free people from the gun."
The Red Book calls on the people of the world to unite... to confront the obstacles. To achieve that end, it directs them to "Be brave to fight. Be brave to win."
It swears to "Defeat American aggression and all their bootlicking dogs," in wave after wave of assault. Then alone will "the monsters be eliminated and the masses will inherit the universe," it asserts.
In that glory of the promised hereafter, it also goads the revolutionaries to sacrifice self-respect, to shed the arrogance of the proletariat, and exalt in humility: "Humility moves a person forward, arrogance pushes him back." Always remember that!
The Book claims that the underdogs make the best revolutionaries. "We must nurture and prepare millions of losers to inherit the revolutionary zeal to prevent the colour of the party and nation from fading. The cadre must pursue the party line and discipline without blinking. They must maintain cordiality and communication with the masses, whether they are active, laborious or self-evasive." These are the only prerequisites to deploy the cadre, Mao informs in his Little Red Book.
Importantly, The Book commands the youth to inherit the earth. "This world is both yours and ours, but ultimately, it is yours alone. You are young, alive, abundant with life-force, abundant with the enthusiasm for life."
"Like the just risen morning sun, you alone are the hope."
If shove comes to putsch (pun intended), Modi and Mao can certainly make strange bedfellows, I tell myself. They ride the same ideological bandwagon with different horses.
A good fifty-five years after my father came to possess the "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung," and underlined his sayings so meticulously, I hold that Little Red Book in my hand... and wonder what lessons my father may have learnt from it, even though he herded the earliest ideologues and practitioners of the Red Revolution to gaol. He didn't leave behind a clue, just that Little Red Book.
Sifting through his chest, I discovered another little notebook in a drawer. It preserved 80 years old jottings by a 17-year-old undergrad at the Allahabad University. Writing on Christmas-eve, the year before India's Independence, Baba makes an interesting entry:
"I would like to note down here the names of a few teachers whose influential effects on myself have been great.
1. Dr. Narvane (At present lecturer of Philosophy in the University of Allard.)
• A young professor of a very gentlemanly type of behavior with the students.
• A great Communist in views and as a member of the party, (of) quite friendly behaviour with me. His full name is Viswanath Narvane. At present I am having some ideas and instructions from him regarding Communism."
Clearly, the "ideas insect," the dimagi Naxal, has been at work for a long time now, drilling his wormhole to a parallel Universe. 🇨🇳
© Shubhrangshu Roy
30 August, 2026
Back to Essays