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On India’s 80th Independence Day, speaking from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Prime Minister Modi cautioned the nation against a new adversary, the “dimagi Naxal” or Naxal mindset. The phrase joins an expanding political lexicon that has produced “urban Naxal”, “Andolanjeevis”, “Khan Market gang”, “tukde-tukde gang”, among others.

These labels derive much of their force from the chaos of the media ecosystem, though their real potency lies in their elasticity. They require neither legal precision nor a clearly defined adversary and can be stretched to accommodate almost anyone who dissents, protests, questions or refuses to conform. The vocabulary blurs disagreement with suspicion and suspicion with hostility.

A day after the speech, Union Minister Kiren Rijiju took to social media to supply the skeletal definition wherein dimagi Naxals were those who support Maoists and reject the constitution, those who stand with separatists and support Article 370 and those who advocate cutting off the “chicken’s neck”, the land link between the northeastern states and the rest of the country.

The advanced clarification of what dimagi Naxal means does little to resolve the problem of elasticity. Placing Maoist insurgency alongside a political position on Article 370, which occupies a completely different legal, constitutional and political terrain, reveals the problem with such elastic and politically charged words.

There are precedents of such ambiguity. On March 11, 2020, the Minister of State for Home........

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