Reading Albert Camus amid ‘Dimaghi Naxals’

Dr Mohit Sharma and Dr Rashid Ali*

‘Violence died today. Or maybe yesterday; I am not sure. The state said it was dead.’ (If Albert Camus were to say this in the post-Camus era!)

What is more ‘surreal’ than the individual in post-Camus era? It is political absurdity. In this Brave New World, absurdity is no longer about a lonely individual braving an indifferent universe. Instead, it arrogates itself to the right of the state.

Albert Camus famously opened The Stranger with a dreary numb announcement of death - ‘My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t Know.’ If he were to rewrite the novella again in today's India, he would probably replace the iconic opening line with this one: ‘Violence died today. Or maybe yesterday; I am not sure. The state said it was dead.’

The profound absurdity wouldn't stem from a mother’s passing, but from a powerful state apparatus declaring absolute peace out of one side of its mouth, while using the other to hunt down a brand-new enemy hiding inside the human mind.

This exact paradox sat right at the centre of the most lamentable comedy in the form of ‘Dimaghi Naxal’ (Naxals of the mind). The new mechanicals are said to be lurking in the shadows and must be rooted out and isolated.

An Enemy Transitions – From Physical Existence to Mind

Even after the claim that Naxalism is thoroughly decimated, the state continues its hunting spree on the Naxal? But you can’t hunt when you declare someone dead. And then the dead haunt. Between hunting and being haunted lies an enemy that is always invented and reinvented. By declaring victory over armed Naxalism, the state now treats ‘Naxalism’ as a paranormal condition.

Originally, a Naxal was an armed political actor who held physical territory, carried weapons and openly challenged the state's authority. The state fought back using what sociologist Max Weber famously called the defining feature of any government: its monopoly over legitimate physical force. It was a recognizable, structural battle. Two competing factions claimed authority over the land, and the state fought to win back its monopoly.

According to the Indian government, its strategy combined intense security operations with ‘development, welfare and rehabilitation.’ The official data showed a massive crash in Left-Wing Extremist violence, leading to the triumphant declaration that India had finally become free of the armed threat on March 31, 2026.

Once a physical enemy vanishes, the political category of ‘the enemy’ doesn't just evaporate. It migrates. ‘Naxal’ travels out of the jungle and directly into the human mind. The threat shifts from an armed body to an ideological thought, from held territory to public conversation and from a physical gun to a written argument.

The Thought Crime

This shift is why the phrase ‘Dimaghi Naxal’ is far more dangerous than a simple political insult. It completely rewrites what it means to be an opponent of the state. You no longer have to pick up a weapon to be lumped in with insurgents. Instead, the state's primary concern becomes what you think, say, and write.

While the government hails the end of Left-Wing Extremism as the start of a ‘new era of peace,’ it uses the exact same moment to warn that the enemy is alive and well inside people's heads. Peace, under this definition, isn't actually the absence of an enemy. This is exactly where Camus’s philosophy becomes so useful.

For Camus, absurdity was born from a fundamental mismatch between human desires and a cold reality. The human mind craves meaning, but a silent universe refuses to provide it. The contemporary political absurd, however, is a completely different beast. Here, the contradiction isn't baked into the universe. It is manufactured directly inside the language of the state.

First, the narrative declares the enemy dead. Then it resurrects the enemy as ideology. Before this ‘dead ideology’ starts haunting the state, the narrative begins hunting down. Probably, the right-wing ideology takes the words of Karl Marx too seriously from the Communist Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.’

Conceptual minefield of Democracy

A democratic state is entirely dependent on its ability to draw bright lines between violence and dissent, between an actual insurgency and basic criticism, between a criminal conspiracy and a political disagreement, and between an armed rebellion and free thought. If those distinct categories collapse into each other, the Weberian monopoly over legitimate violence transforms into something far more dangerous: a monopoly over the very definition of what constitutes a legitimate political consciousness.

The issue here isn't about whether Maoist violence was a real threat. Nor is it a question of whether the Indian state had the right to protect its citizens from armed insurgency. The real question is what happens after that insurgency has essentially disappeared. Does the state return political disagreement back to the ordinary, messy arena of democratic debate? Or does the ghost of the defeated enemy become a permanent template through which all future disagreement is filtered?

That is the true, chilling significance of the word ‘Dimaghi’ which is essentially Arabic. He could have used the Sanskrit equivalent ‘Medhavi’ as well, but he didn’t. In fact, he turned linguistic and political world into one homogeneous entity even without reading Mir Taqi Mir. Mir’s couplet can be the most dangerous weapon of homogeneity which reads as: Ham hue tum hue ki Mir hue - Ek hi zulf ke aseer hue (Be it you, me or Mir, we all became prisoners of the same beloved's tresses.)

Hence, Dimaghi acts as a linguistic bridge connecting physical violence to human thought. While an armed Naxal can be confronted directly by police or security forces on a physical battlefield, a ‘Naxal of the mind’ requires an entirely different, invisible apparatus. It demands a system of constant identification, classification, surveillance, public denunciation, institutional exclusion and social isolation. How well-read a person can be. Imagine he has so conveniently mugged up the five-question formula of Harold Lasswell - the ultimate propaganda model.

The battlefield is no longer a physical jungle; it is epistemological. Who gets to sit in judgment over what constitutes a ‘Naxal mind’? Who determines whether a critique is just a critique, or a piece of calculated ideological subversion? Who draws the line between quiet sympathy and vocal dissent? And ultimately, in a state that polices thought, who watches the watchers?

There is a massive historical irony staring us in the face here. India broke the spine of colonial rule through a vibrant political tradition where fierce dissent, sharp arguments, rogue journalism and wildly competing visions for the country's future were allowed to flourish. Independence meant to be a promise of political dignity of all Indians, declaring that the people would no longer be managed as objects of imperial paranoia and suspicion.

This is precisely why the ‘Dimaghi Naxal’ narrative deserves something much deeper than just lazy partisan outrage or equally lazy partisan applause. It demands rigorous conceptual scrutiny. In modern political commentary, there is a constant, cheap temptation to label every single contradiction as mere hypocrisy. But hypocrisy is far too simple a box for what is happening here. We are witnessing something infinitely more fascinating: the political afterlife of a phantom enemy.

The armed insurgent might be fading from the physical landscape, but the abstract category of Naxalism is surviving by evolving into an increasingly shapeshifting ghost. It began as a concrete local movement, morphed into a broad ideology, transformed into a dangerous "mentality," and now risks becoming a convenient catch-all label to silence the politically inconvenient.

True anatomy of our post-Camus condition

In Camus’s classic philosophy, a lonely individual realizes with a jolt that the physical world cannot give him the deep meaning he craves. But in our new, post-Camus state, the political order does the exact opposite. It manufactures meaning in exhausting excess. Under this gaze, no dissent can ever be organic; it must have a hidden, malicious cause. No criticism can be taken at face value; it must have a dark ideological genealogy. No disagreement is innocent; there must be a hidden enemy pulling the strings from behind the curtain.

The real danger here isn't that the state will pack up its things and head back out into the physical jungle. The real danger is that the jungle is being brought directly into the human mind.

This is why we have to examine any official declaration of peace with a healthy dose of skepticism. A society doesn't magically become peaceful just because its rebels have stopped carrying rifles. Peace only means something when everyday citizens no longer have to worry that their private thoughts, public arguments or political disagreements will automatically transform them into enemies of the state.

Therefore, the ultimate test of whether India has truly defeated Naxalism isn't just about counting fewer guns on the ground. It is about whether the state can now handle a free argument. We are left trapped inside a permanent paradox: the state triumphantly announces that the violence has ended - and then immediately begins hunting for it inside our heads.

(*Dr Mohit Sharma and Dr Rashid Ali teach at the Central University of Jammu)