When Building Consensus and Naming an Enemy Cannot Both Be the Strategy

A Speech With Two Different Instincts Prime Minister Narendra Modi's

13th Independence Day address contained two ideas that don't sit easily together. The first: a genuine, sizeable commitment to youth - AI skill training for one crore young Indians, free online coaching for competitive exams and a renewed push on quantum technology, robotics and space.

The second: a new phrase, "dimagi Naxals," aimed at critics the Prime Minister said had entrenched themselves in the system to manipulate policymaking and needed to be isolated. One instinct reaches toward the country's young people.

The other draws a line against a category of people just vague enough to include almost any determined critic.

WHY THE FIRST INSTINCT WAS NECESSARY

The backdrop mattered. Weeks earlier, nationwide student protests over exam-paper leaks - the "Cockroach Movement"

• had forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign, a rare and significant concession. That kind of unrest doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from a demographic bulge entering a job market being reshaped faster than institutions can adapt, with trust in examination integrity itself in question. Against that, a serious skilling commitment is not just good politics - it is a genuine attempt to meet a real structural problem with real resources.

WHY THE SECOND INSTINCT UNDERMINES THE FIRST

But naming "dimagi Naxals" does something a skilling programme cannot undo. It tells the very civil society, academics and student voices who forced the government's hand on exam integrity that raising concerns marks them as threats rather than participants.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, in a separate Independence Day address, made a related point from an entirely different direction: that India needs its own indigenous philosophy of development rather than either mimicking Western techno-capitalism or treating dissent as something to be purged.

When even a sympathetic voice within the ruling coalition's ideological family is calling for genuine deliberation, dismissing critics as saboteurs looks less like strength and more like an unforced retreat from the harder work of persuasion.

WHAT ACTUALLY GETS LOST A

government facing genuinely unprecedented demographic and technological disruption needs sustained buy-in across political lines - because AI-driven job displacement, exam-system reform and skilling at the scale of one crore youth will all outlast any single administration's term.

That kind of buy-in cannot be manufactured by branding today's critics as tomorrow's enemies; it has to be built, argument by argument, including with people the government finds inconvenient. The Prime Minister's speech showed he understands the scale of India's youth challenge.

It did not yet show he understands that meeting it requires bringing more people into the tent, not fewer.

THE STANDARD THIS SHOULD BE HELD TO A

speech is not just its policy content - it is also a signal about what kind of national conversation the government wants. Ambitious skilling targets deserve genuine credit. But a government that wants credit for reaching toward consensus cannot, in the same breath, narrow who is allowed to be part of it.