On a tense night an adolescent of perhaps fourteen years laments that he has still not been able to beat a police officer as of yet. The one beside him beams that “today” police officers are being hurt. While a couple of youngsters strut in with hand painted posters being distributed by a dedicated group of “art-activists”, and on another side a team of videographers are constantly suggesting their influencers to strut or pose in a specific way. The competition to catch the most eyeballs is ongoing between two groups full of 20-year-olds, as they both help their group members style their clothes, for the best pictures. All of this happens while a police speaker blasts requests for protestors to stay behind barricades and not throw water bottles. A scene like this was a common occurrence in the short heydays of CJP protest.
While the scene unfolds the question to ask oneself is quite simple. What makes an adolescent shout profanity at a woman Prime Minister of another nation? What does it take to morph a student issue, towards anarchy? And more importantly, who pays the consequences of such anarchy? A movement that starts in urban centers or a movement that starts in rural Hinterland, both with genuine grievances but they both end with calls of anarchy, of violence physical or symbolic, what perpetuates this?
The nature of “Dimagi Naxal”, a word that PM Modi used from the ramparts of the Red Fort, aptly answers both the questions. The Naxal chooses to use the violence of weapons to attack the integrity of the nation, while the Dimagi naxal uses the bombardment of propaganda. It takes into account that fact itself doesn't matter, the act itself doesn't matter, what matters is the aesthetic of the actions. Neither cares much for the consequences of the actual act. Neither cares much for the underlying facts. What matters in both cases is the aesthetic of the actions.
And in both cases of violent Naxalis and Dimagi Naxal, the primary victims are always the ones they claim to fight for. An individual who really wants to create change for the community, in theory, should be the last person willing to risk the well-being of the community. Yet the history shows an inversely proportional pattern to rhetoric of Dimagi Naxals about a community and the well-being of the said community. The reason behind such change is simply the gap between the life of the person giving such rhetoric and the actual cost of what they are proposing. And this gap in between is the soil where a Dimagi Naxal seed finds its place to grow.
For example, take into account, where most of the individuals who wield power in such groups come from, The Naxal movement was started by a leadership coming heavily from the background of landed gentry. With the background of leaders of the Naxal movement, we will see an unquestionable imprint of privilege, the same is true for most “viral activists” supporting them from safe rooms of academic institutions. They come with privilege to actually be shielded from the consequences of their actions.
Rob Handerson coined the term “luxury beliefs”, which says that while traditionally, the rich showed wealth through material things like designer clothes or expensive cars i.e. the signs of visible success that anyone can glance and recognise. Today, affluent people often use “activism” to show this status. To them it costs nothing to talk about radical changes, because they are never asked to live the aftermath of it. They can talk freely against institutions that create stability, they can use genuine grievances to attack these institutions for their complete destruction. And what is the goal of this whole practice? It is to show they belong to an enlightened and educated elite.
But the point is that the people who hold such beliefs are usually the ones protected from these consequences. As an example, most academic groups which show support to violent naxal groups, went to Naxal affected areas as “tourists” for a few days and weeks to take pictures, they never needed to actually live with the consequence of their actions. That was borne by the local communities living there, they were ones who lost their eyes, hands and other body parts on the mines that were laid by Naxalis. In the same manner, a so-called intellectual can hug and shake hands with terrorists because they never had to live under the terror of them. Such luxury beliefs are inculcated and promoted with a sense of urgency by people who will never truly feel the consequences of them. This sense of urgency and doom is precisely what makes a “Dimagi Naxal” dangerous. They borrow the language of solidarity, while practicing tourism in the name of it.
But we should not limit the Dimagi Naxal to a single uniform category. It has at least one other distinct type, and each type has its own distinctive motives. If the first type cares about the ideology or the message they are propagating. And wants to be seen to “think correctly”, even when that thinking does not survive contact with reality. The second type cares about something else entirely: it does not care about the message; it cares about the medium through which the message is travelling.
Now let's go back to the same night as earlier and picture this second individual arriving at the same site with this motive. They pick up the most clickbait-friendly poster from the first group. The site itself is the background for that “great” shot of pictures they want to post. They shoot a short video for reels between the chants. Now what's the final goal of such an activity? It's not to bring change, or as the sentence goes to “inform others” through the content created here. The goal is action happening at the time itself. The goal is the content itself, the reach it creates, and the numbers the specific post can command the next morning.
Why does a distinction between the two matters? Can we not understand the motive behind such posts as purely material, purely about the money it can bring? At a small scale yes, an honest accountant should not pretend otherwise. But is it just limited to it? No, it's not the only reason and in many cases it's not even the main reason. Here we have to look at the immediate gratification reached by the number of likes and how chasing the next high of the same gratification becomes the primary motivator for the actions of this second category of Dimagi Naxal. And as Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan said famously that "The medium is the message”, to say in simple terms the form of the message is more important than the content of it. The way something is said outweighs what is actually being said and the dopamine high the Dimagi Naxal gets from their actions through the reels.
Short form videos have changed how attention itself works in the modern world, and it has done it in a way that most institutions were not even ready for. Catchy lines and short attention spans dominate and dictate what survives online and what disappears in a few seconds never to be seen again. The only reliable way to get noticed is to trigger a sense of urgency and to create an emotional reaction in the first few moments of the short reel, so it's important to have that psychological hook in the first line, in the first poster and in the first curse that comes out. And that reaction more often than not comes dressed up as calls of destruction, as destruction is legible in a way that patient arguments and change is not, whatever the cause maybe be, the shock value is most important and so is its use. A poster with curse words will be posted a thousand times before an official enquiry's first paragraph is being read by one person. So while the first Dimagi Naxal uses unworkable ideas to show their supposed enlightenment, a content farmer cares not for it, the only reason they use the term is so they can farm the contents and the form, and the medium itself promotes such actions.
To look at this in dry academic formats is easy, but what we need to understand is the real consequences of such thought processes. These consequences lie outside of the AC seminar rooms and the comment sections alike. When a Dimagi Naxal, supports ideas, intellectualises and academises ideas of violence, it leads to over 17542 violent incidents in less than a decade as quoted by PIB. These are not abstract figures to be picked at, each incident creates a real life victim, who is being cosplayed on the roads of Delhi. Each represents a family life interrupted and education stopped because a young girl stopped from going to school and a young boy losing his hands because he picked up a mine left by Naxals thinking that it's a toy to play with. The same communities so often invoked to justify the movements in the first place, who are quoted in speeches, photographed for reports and then left to manage the aftermath of the violence.
The same pattern shows up close to home in Dimagi Naxals. In the normalisation, glorification and near-coolification of violence among young. It reaches a point where violence becomes a milestone to be covered rather than a failure to be avoided. The real victims here are the same adolescents whose genuine concerns and legitimate grievances are swallowed up by the greed of the privileged and the unquenching appetite of the content hungry. The genuine concerns are buried under borrowed slogans and posters that no longer resemble the original complaints.
So, when the discussion happens on Dimagi Naxal, it's important to acknowledge who the victims are of them? It's not only the communities and institutions they villanise, no the victims are directly also the people they claim to be fighting for, and ultimately a Dimagi Naxal thought process is a Jungian devouring loop, of destroying the ones it claims to protect.
To answer the question we started with, “What makes an adolescent of twelve- or fourteen-years shout profanities towards a woman Prime Minister of another nation?”
It is a mind shaped by a Dimagi Naxal, which is made of the need to feel superior after a small lifetime of being protected from all consequences. It is one voice in a larger crowd chasing the next content, in a never-ending cycle of actions, whose aim is to generate more such actions rather than creating any change, but the social media moment the action can produce. The individual does not know this consciously in many cases, it has simply observed what the medium has taught, that noise gets noticed and silent work does not.
So, in a world shaped by voices and mediums like this, what should be our way? Or a solution?
The answer is not new, even if the problems seem distinctly modern. There have always been clamorous voices which have talked about tearing down rather than building, and while confronting such voices Swami Vivekanand asked a simple question of them, we must ask these questions all over again to all who insist on anarchy in the name of change and reform. Swamiji looked at these voices and asked: where are those who want reform for themselves? A real change doesn't just come from tearing down the outward institution of the day which is easiest to blame at that moment. As he put it a real change comes by,
“First educate the nation, create your legislative body, and then the law will be forthcoming. First create the power, the sanction from which the law will spring.”
As an independent India, we have created our own legislation, our own laws but what about the changes that need to be made in oneself? That is still the harder, quieter path and precisely why so few choose it. It asks for patience, instead of performance, substance instead of aesthetic, and years instead of a single viral afternoon.
Real reform begins with the reformer, not with ruins left behind. Until the lesson by Swami Vivekananda is learned, the Dimagi Naxal will keep finding the next adolescent willing to lament that they have not yet done enough damage and communities these movements claim to serve will keep paying a bill they never agreed to.
None of this means genuine concerns are not present and should not be answered to. What it does mean is, the need to separate the placard held by a genuinely aggrieved individual from that of the machinery which keeps hijacking it. The point is to separate the genuine voice from the urgency of “luxury beliefs” and the race of content farming.
(This article was contributed by Sh. Utkarsh Dubey of JNU for abvp.org)