The Irony of 'Dimagi Naxals': Ancient Texts Challenge Modern Hindutva

New Delhi, India Aug 29, 2026 ALN: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s newly minted phrase dimagi Naxal – “intellectual Naxal” – is meant to designate an ideological enemy: people whose ideas supposedly endanger the nation by questioning its political direction.

In his Independence Day address this year, Modi warned that although armed Naxalism was nearing its end, its ideological adherents are still a threat. Critics immediately pointed out the phrase’s obvious affinity with the government’s earlier use of the phrase “urban Naxal” to stigmatise academics, activists, intellectuals, and other dissenting voices.

There is, however, an unintended irony in this language. If dimagi Naxal is to mean someone who questions authority, then some of the earliest and most formidable dimagi Naxals in India were the sages who composed the Vedas and Upanishads – texts that the Hindutva brigade claims as the philosophical wellspring of their ideology.

Just last year, at an event in Ahmedabad, Home Minister Amit Shah shared his post-retirement plans: to study the Vedas and the Upanishads. While this interest in India’s ancient texts may appear commendable, a closer look at Vedic literature reveals a complex, pluralistic, and heterodox tradition that is fundamentally at odds with the ideology that Shah and his associates champion.

The regular appeal to the Vedic tradition by the Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent, the Rashtriya Swayansevak Sangh, in order to legitimise a Hindu nationalist agenda is more than a cultural fantasy: it has gone hand-in-hand with a political vision in which dissent is equated with treason, and pluralism with weakness.

Since coming to power in 2014, the BJP-led government has been increasingly criticised for marginalising religious minorities and muzzling press freedom. Voices that question the government have been trolled as “anti-national”, “sickular”, “tukde-tukde gang”, “urban Naxal” and now “dimaagi Naxal.”

However, should Modi or Shah seriously engage with the Vedas in search of validation for the Hindutva project, they may find themselves disappointed. The Vedas and the Upanishads, far from offering uncritical support to religious dogma and philosophical certitude, constitute the foundation of a long tradition of rigorous argumentation, critique, and scepticism – even about the gods.

Consider, for instance, the famous Nasadiya Sukta from the oldest extant Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda, composed circa mid-2nd millennium BCE. This creation hymn speculates on various paradoxical possibilities for the origins of the cosmos, before culminating in a profound doubt about whether even the gods possess such knowledge:

“…Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows or perhaps he does not know.”

— (X, 129, 6-7, translation by Wendy Doniger)

This radical questioning of the gods is deepened in the Upanishads, composed from around the 8th century BCE. The oldest and longest of them, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for instance, not only displays a spirit of irreverence towards the gods but actively urges seekers not to venerate them as powers external to the self.

One of the principal ideas developed in the Upanishads is the oneness of atman (the self) and brahman (absolute reality). This knowledge reveals a profound unity with the cosmos, leading to compassion for all beings. In this state, the gods become dispensable, as the self is understood to be one with them.

“Yet, as the Brihadaranyaka warns, the gods – driven by their hunger for power – seek to withhold this knowledge from humans: If a man knows ‘I am brahman’ in this way, he becomes the whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (atman). So when a man venerates another deity, thinking, ‘He is one, and I am another,’ he does not understand. … The gods are not pleased at the prospect of men coming to understand this.”

— (1.4, translation by Patrick Olivelle)

This passage portrays the gods as dependent on human ignorance for their power, as insecure beings protective of their status, and as fearful of human enlightenment. The Upanishads consistently engage in such trenchant power critique, as is also evidenced from several philosophical disputes voiced in the texts.

We find one such debate in Chapter 3 of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad where the sage Yajnavalkya fields profound metaphysical questions from a range of scholars, including Gargi Vachaknavi, a woman who not only challenges Yajnavalkya’s wisdom but also mocks him repeatedly for his opaque explanations.

This tradition of intellectual contestation and public debate stands in sharp contrast with the atmosphere of censorship and religio-moral policing enabled by the Modi-Shah regime – not to mention the glaring absence of accountability to a free press, with the prime minister refusing to address a single press conference since taking office.

Similarly, while the last decade has seen Hindutva goons frequently lynching individuals suspected of eating beef, the Vedas clearly portray a society where eating cow-meat was common practice both in sacrificial feasts like the gomedha and in social ceremonies like weddings and funerals, as several verses in the Rig Veda indicate.

Even Swami Vivekananda attested to this fact, when he wrote that according to ancient scriptures, “he is not a good Hindu who does not eat beef” (Complete Works, Vol. 3, “Buddhistic India”).

The RSS-BJP’s appropriation of ancient India is not only intellectually dishonest but also corrosive to the country’s historically diverse and secular social fabric.

Of course, the Vedas, like all ancient texts, are deeply flawed. They do contain hierarchical ideas, such as varna, which later consolidated into caste oppression. Yet they also offer fertile ground for multiple contesting – even contradictory – narratives to coexist and thrive.

If the sages who composed these texts were alive today, they would certainly have faced the ire of the government, vilified on social media for questioning the status quo, and perhaps been labeled dimagi Naxals.

Tuhin Bhattacharjee is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago.