India, Aug. 18 -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi's warning from the ramparts of the Red Fort about the threat posed by what he termed "dimagi Naxals" deserves a serious national conversation. India has achieved extraordinary success against armed Naxalism. But the defeat of an armed insurgency does not automatically mean the disappearance of the ideological ecosystem that sustained it.

For decades, armed Naxalism did not survive merely because cadres operated from forests. Every insurgency needs an ecosystem: narratives that legitimise violence, networks that amplify those narratives, organisations capable of mobilising resources, and intellectual voices willing to portray attacks on the constitutional state as revolutionary justice. The a...