Delhi’s air this winter was not merely toxic, it was apocalyptic. PM2.5 levels surged past 400, schools shut down, emergency rooms saw spikes in respiratory distress, and the Chicago Air Quality Life Index once again warned that Delhiites are losing 8.2 years of life expectancy to polluted air. If ever there were a moment demanding public outrage, scientific accountability, and political courage, it was this one.

Students arriving at India Gate were not wrong to protest. They were not wrong to question why the national capital continues to choke every November, and they were certainly not wrong to demand that the state address this public-health crisis with urgency. Yet, by nightfall, a protest that should have been a call for cleaner governance mutated, inexplicably and disturbingly, into a stage for Maoist sloganeering and posters celebrating Madvi Hidma – a man responsible for some of the deadliest massacres in modern India. This was not an accident; it was a diagnostic. It exposed the quiet, disciplined machinery of what can only be described today as Breaking India Forces 2.0, a network that feeds on genuine grievances to launder extremist symbols and destabilising narratives into mainstream civic spaces.

To understand how ludicrous, and simultaneously dangerous, this transformation was, one must first recognise who Madvi Hidma really was. Far from being a campus poet of revolution, Hidma was the commander of the CPI (Maoist) Battalion 1, associated with the Dantewada massacre of 2010 that killed seventy-six CRPF jawans, the Darbha Valley attack of 2013 that assassinated senior Congress leaders, and multiple strikes on road workers, schoolteachers, and tribal villagers who wanted roads, vaccination camps, and basic development. Security sources credit Hidma with orchestrating multiple ambushes, attacking state infrastructure and targeting informants in tribal belts – making him a symbol of Maoist terror. His death in late 2025, during a multi-state intelligence-led operation, was hailed by security forces as one of the most decisive blows to Maoism in years. And yet, in the heart of Delhi, students who cannot locate Bastar on a map were shouting “Hidma amar rahe," as if he were a martyr of climate justice rather than an architect of tribal suffering. This is not activism; it is ideological laundering, the kind that Breaking India Forces specialise in: the rebranding of violent actors into........

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