4 min readAug 16, 2026 12:25 PM IST First published on: Aug 16, 2026 at 12:19 PM ISTIn his speech marking the 80th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned to themes he has eloquently outlined earlier — and sought to connect them to a new motif. As he has done often, he divided the nation’s journey into two, before-and-after 2014, with everything, from poverty alleviation to the embrace of new technologies, picking up pace in the last 12 years. “Yeh raftar, yeh vistar”, this speed and this scale, he said, was visible for the first time since Independence. Several by-now familiar keywords and exhortations were embedded in his picture of a nation on the move, guided by “shakti ki saptadhara”, a seven-point reform vision — “atmanirbharta”, “innovation hub”, “vocal for local”, “start-up India”, “reform express”. He framed the nation’s trajectory against the backdrop of mounting global crises, from the pandemic to the weaponisation of resources by countries amid wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. What was new at Red Fort, however, was the PM’s invocation of “yuva shakti”, or youth power, and his attempt to link it to the goal of “Viksit Bharat”. In a speech that comes on the heels of a student movement that forced the government to listen and drew national attention to long simmering education and employment crises, the Prime Minister sought to reclaim and relocate the “young” — from the image of the protester on the street, ranged against government and establishment, to the driving force of the India reform story, who is also its prime “labharthi” or beneficiary.Also Read | Bar Council breaks the law to crawl, its chief must goThe young received special attention from the PM. He announced a programme for AI training and free online coaching classes for competitive examinations. He spoke of the Innovation Fund, and promised to bring together “aapke sapne”, especially Olympic dreams, with the nation’s “sansadhan” or resources. The young, said the PM, could also help official enumerators conduct the ongoing Census exercise in their homes more accurately. These evocative mentions of the young, the invitation to them to join a nation-wide exercise, were not incidental — with echoes of the upsurge at Jantar Mantar still to fade away, they were an attempt to restore and retrieve, and take the edge off the moment.AdvertisementBut the speech had a sharp edge of its own. Talking about his government’s successes in tackling the scourge of Naxal violence, the PM articulated a remaining challenge — while “hathiyari Naxals (armed insurgents)” have been defeated, there is a need to remain wary of the danger posed by “dimagi Naxals (those with Maoist thinking)”. The latter, he said, must be identified and isolated so that the youth can be brought together to build a developed country. The connections the PM made in this formulation — his equation of an armed insurgency with ideas/dissent/ideology, and his linking of both to the young that he is trying to reach out to — are troubling. For, there is no equivalence between “hathiyari” and “dimagi”, and the bogey of the enemy within is at odds with the country he paints in the rest of his speech. There is no place for isolating or targeting anyone on the basis of their ideas — their “dimag“. The PM is right when he says yuva shakti will fuel the journey to Viksit Bharat, but that calls for celebrating the power of thought and freedom from fear, so that questions are asked and there is an unafraid search for answers. Only that can shape and refine what it means to be viksit.