Hyderabad, Jan. 20 -- In contemporary India, terms such as "deshdrohi," "urban Naxal," "sickular" and "presstitutes" have increasingly been deployed by right-wing ideologues, not as analytical descriptors but as instruments of political delegitimisation. Their elasticity and, considering some terms are newly coined, lack of accepted definition, allow dissent to be falsely projected as disloyalty.

This rhetorical move is strikingly inconsistent with an earlier, widely reported assessment that former armed Naxalites were "not anti-nationals" but citizens alienated by governance failures: an acknowledgement that opposition to a government does not equate to opposition to the nation.

Dissent is a nation's 'quality-control' mechanism

Across...