‘Dimagi naxals’: The freedom to disagree is a political right – and is economically valuable

education August 19, 2026

On Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned that while armed naxalism had largely been defeated, a different danger remained. He cautioned agains “dimagi naxals” – those who, he suggested, carry naxalite thinking in their minds. He said that they needed to be identified and isolated.

The political debate that followed has understandably focused on what exactly Modi meant and whom the phrase was intended to describe. But there is a more fundamental question worth asking: what happens when the state begins to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate ideas?

This is not simply a question about freedom of speech. It is also a question about competition, information and the possibility of institutional error.

Richard Posner, in Economic Analysis of Law, offers an unexpectedly useful way of thinking about this. In his discussion of the protection of free markets in ideas and religion, he approaches freedom of expression through an economic intuition: ideas, like goods, benefit from competition. The state should therefore be cautious about intervening in the marketplace in which ideas compete. The analogy deserves to be taken seriously.