Politics of Separatism; Communalism and the Politics of Partition

Politics of Separatism: Communalism and the Politics of Partition

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Communalism was one of the most significant and tragic dimensions of colonial India’s political life, culminating eventually in the Partition of the country in 1947. To understand it correctly, it must first be grasped as an ideology — a specific way of viewing Indian society — before it is understood as a set of historical events, riots or political parties.

Part I: Communalism as Ideology

The Three Stages of Communal Ideology

• Communalism, or communal ideology, consists of three basic elements or stages, each following from the one before.
  • Stage One — the belief in common religious interests. This is the bedrock of communal ideology: the notion that people who follow the same religion also share common secular interests — political, economic, social and cultural.
    • From this arises the idea of socio-political communities based on religion — not classes, nationalities, linguistic-cultural groups, nations, or politico-territorial units like provinces or states — as the fundamental units of Indian society.
    • It is believed that Indians can act socially and politically, and protect their collective interests, only as members of these religion-based communities, each allegedly possessing its own leadership.
  • Stage Two — the belief that these interests diverge. In a multi-religious society like India, the secular interests of the followers of one religion are held to be dissimilar and divergent from those of another.
  • Stage Three — the belief that these interests are irreconcilable. At this final stage, the interests of different religious “communities” are seen as mutually incompatible, antagonistic and hostile — the communalist now asserts that Hindus and Muslims cannot have common secular interests at all.
• Communalism is, therefore, above all an ideology on which communal politics rests; communal violence is merely a conjunctural consequence of that ideology.

From Nationalist Hindu to Extreme Communalist: How the Stages Play Out

• Communal ideology in a person, party or movement typically starts at the first stage.
  • Many nationalists fell prey to it, or thought within its confines, even while rejecting the other two elements — the notion of mutual divergence or hostility between religion-based communities. These were people who saw themselves as Nationalist Hindus, Nationalist Muslims, Nationalist Sikhs, rather than simply as nationalists.
• The second stage may be described as liberal or moderate communalism.
  • The liberal communalist practised communal politics while still upholding liberal, democratic, humanist and nationalist values.
  • Even while holding that India consisted of distinct religion-based communities with separate interests that sometimes conflicted, he continued to believe — and publicly professed — that these interests could gradually be harmonised within a developing overall national interest, with India built as one nation.
  • Most communalists before 1937 — the Hindu Mahasabha, the Muslim League, the Ali Brothers after 1925, M.A. Jinnah, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Lajpat Rai, and N.C. Kelkar after 1922 — functioned within this liberal communal framework.
• Extreme communalism, functioning broadly within a fascist syndrome, formed the third and final stage.
  • It was based on fear and hatred, tending towards violence of language, deed and behaviour — the language of war and enmity against political opponents.
  • At this stage, communalists declared that Muslims, “Muslim culture” and Islam, or Hindus, “Hindu culture” and Hinduism, faced suppression and extermination, and both sides advanced the theory that Hindus and Muslims constituted separate nations locked in permanent, irresolvable antagonism.
  • The Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha after 1937, along with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), increasingly veered towards this extreme, fascistic communalism.
• Though distinct, the three stages interacted continuously: the first stage fed both liberal and extreme communalism, making it difficult to combat them, while the liberal communalist, in turn, found it hard to prevent the ideological slide into extremism.

The Unreality of “Communal” Interests

• While a communalist spoke of defending his “community’s” interests, in real life no such interests existed outside the field of religion. The economic and political interests of Hindus, Muslims and others were, in fact, identical — in that sense, they did not even constitute separate communities.
  • As Hindus or Muslims, they had no separate political-economic life or interests on an all-India, or even regional, basis. They were divided from fellow Hindus or Muslims by region, language, culture, class, caste, social status, and food and dress habits, and united on these very dimensions with followers of other religions.
  • An upper-class Muslim had far more in common — even culturally — with an upper-class Hindu than with a lower-class Muslim; a Punjabi Hindu stood culturally closer to a Punjabi Muslim than to a Bengali Hindu, and the same held true in reverse.
  • The unreal communal division thus obscured the real division of the Indian people into linguistic-cultural regions and social classes, as well as their real, growing unity as a nation.
• If communal interests did not exist, communalism was not merely a partial or sectional view of social reality — it was a wrong and unscientific one.
  • A communalist could not, therefore, truly be serving his community’s interests either, nor could he be its genuine “representative.” In claiming to serve his community, he served — knowingly or unknowingly — some other interest altogether, deceiving either others or himself.

Communalism Is a Modern Phenomenon

• Communalism is sometimes seen as a survival from the medieval past. In fact, while it draws on elements of ancient and medieval ideologies, it is essentially a modern political trend expressing the social urges and serving the political needs of modern social groups, classes and forces. Its roots and objectives lie squarely in the modern period of Indian history, brought into being and sustained by the contemporary socio-economic structure.

How Communalism Emerged

• Communalism emerged as a consequence of the rise of modern politics, marking a sharp break from pre-1857 politics.
  • Like nationalism and socialism, it could emerge as ideology and politics only once politics based on popular participation, mobilization and public opinion had come into existence. In pre-modern politics, the people were either ignored within upper-class politics or forced to rebel outside the system, with successful rebel leaders simply absorbed into the old ruling classes.
  • As Jawaharlal Nehru observed in 1936: “One must never forget that communalism in India is a latter-day phenomenon which has grown up before our eyes.” Nor was there anything uniquely Indian about it — it was the product of conditions that, in other societies, produced comparable phenomena such as Fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland, or the Christian-Muslim conflict in Lebanon.
• Communal consciousness arose from the transformation of Indian society under colonialism and the struggle against it.
  • The growing economic, political and administrative unification of the country, the process of nation-making, the deepening contradiction between colonialism and the Indian people, and the formation of modern social classes all called for new ways of perceiving common interest, wider loyalties and new identities — needs that also flowed from the birth of a new, mass-based politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
  • Grasping this new reality through new, unifying principles — the modern ideas of nationalism, cultural-linguistic development and class struggle — was bound to be difficult and gradual. Wherever this growth remained slow or partial, people fell back on older, familiar categories of self-identity — caste, locality, region, race, religion, sect and occupation — to make sense of the changing world.
  • In parts of India, and among some sections of the people, religious consciousness was thus transformed into communal consciousness, because certain features of the Indian situation favoured its growth and it served the needs of specific social and political forces.

Why Communalism Succeeded in the 20th Century

• Though not inherent or inevitable, communalism was also not merely a conspiracy of power-hungry politicians and crafty administrators — it had genuine socio-economic and political roots, without which it could not have endured.
• Colonial underdevelopment and middle-class unemployment. Communalism was, above all, a by-product of the colonial character of the Indian economy — its stagnation and underdevelopment, and their impact on Indian lives, particularly the middle classes, created conditions conducive to both social division and radical transformation.
  • Throughout the twentieth century, in the absence of modern industrial development and adequate education, health and social services, unemployment was acute — especially among educated middle and lower-middle-class Indians who could not fall back on land, and whose socio-economic condition steadily deteriorated. These prospects worsened further during the Great Depression after 1928.
  • The nationalist and other popular movements offered a long-term solution — the overthrow of colonialism and radical social transformation — and the middle classes indeed formed the backbone of both the militant national movement from 1905 to 1947 and the Left-wing parties and groups from the 1920s onward.
  • Unfortunately, some sections of the middle class, lacking a wider social vision, turned instead to narrow, short-term solutions for their personal or sectional problems — communal, caste or provincial reservation in jobs, municipal committees or legislatures.
• Competition for limited opportunities. Economic stagnation produced intense competition for government jobs, professional openings in law and medicine, and business markets.
  • Middle-class individuals used every means at their disposal — educational qualifications and merit, but also nepotism and bribery — and, to widen their base in this competition, also invoked group identities such as caste, province and religion.
  • Some individuals did benefit, in the short run, from communalism, especially in government employment — lending communal politics a certain aura of validity, since it had a basis, however partial and short-term, in the lived experience of the middle classes.
  • The spread of education among well-off peasants and small landlords gradually extended the boundaries of the job-seeking middle class into rural areas. Newly educated rural youth, unable to be sustained by a stagnant agrarian economy, flocked to towns seeking government jobs and professional openings, fighting for them through communal reservations and nominations — thereby widening communalism’s social base to include the rural upper strata of peasants and landlords.
• The middle-class oscillation between anti-imperialism and communalism. The crisis of the colonial economy constantly generated two opposing tendencies among the middle classes.
  • When prospects of anti-imperialist revolution and social change appeared on the agenda, the middle classes enthusiastically joined national and popular movements, advocating the cause of the entire society and merging their own interests with the wider anti-imperialist struggle.
  • But when the struggle entered a more passive phase, many shifted to short-term, communal solutions for personal problems — functioning, in effect, as a narrow, selfish interest group that objectively served colonialism.
  • With the same underlying social causation, large sections of the middle classes across the country constantly oscillated between anti-imperialism and communal politics — making the communal question, at its heart, a middle-class question.
    • It should be noted, however, that a large number of middle-class individuals — especially most intellectuals, whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh — remained largely free of communalism even in the 1930s and 1940s. The typical Indian intellectual of the period tended to be both secular and broadly Left-wing.
• Government service and communal reservations. With few openings in industry, commerce, education or other social services, government service was the main avenue of middle-class employment — as late as 1951, while 1.2 million people were covered by the Factory Acts, 3.3 million found employment in government service.
  • Communal politics could therefore be used to pressure the government into reserving jobs and professional college seats along communal and caste lines. Communal politics until 1937 was largely organized around government jobs, educational concessions and political positions — seats in legislative councils and municipal bodies — that controlled access to these opportunities.
  • Though communalists spoke in the name of their “communities,” the reservations and “rights” they demanded were virtually confined to these two areas; they took up no issues of genuine interest to the masses.
• Communalism’s distortion of class conflict. Communalism often misrepresented social tension and class conflict between exploiters and exploited belonging to different religions as purely communal conflict.
  • The underlying discontent was real, arising from non-religious factors, but because of backward political consciousness, it found distorted expression in communal terms. As C.G. Shah put it: “Under the pressure of communal propaganda, the masses are unable to locate the real causes of their exploitation, oppression, and suffering and imagine a fictitious communal source of their origin.”
  • This distortion was made possible by a specific feature of Indian social development — in several regions, religious distinctions coincided with social and class distinctions. Exploiting groups such as landlords, merchants and moneylenders were often upper-caste Hindus, while the poor and exploited were Muslims or lower-caste Hindus, allowing communal propaganda to succeed even when factually incorrect.
    • The tenant-landlord struggle in East Bengal and Malabar, and the peasant-debtor versus merchant-moneylender conflict in Punjab, could thus be portrayed as Hindu-Muslim struggles. In Punjab, big Muslim landlords used communalism to turn their Muslim tenants’ anger towards Hindu traders and moneylenders, while the latter used communalism to defend their own threatened class interests by raising the cry of “Hindu interests in danger.”
  • In reality, the peasants’ struggle for emancipation was inevitable — the real question was what ideological-political content it would acquire. Both communalists and colonial administrators stressed the communal, rather than class, aspect of agrarian exploitation, holding that Muslim peasants and debtors were exploited not as peasants and debtors but because they were Muslims.
  • In many cases, a communal colouring was imposed on social conflict not by its participants but by observers — officials, journalists, politicians, and even historians — offering post-facto communal explanations shaped by their own outlook.
    • Agrarian conflicts did not, in fact, assume a communal colour until the twentieth century, and even then, not in most cases. In the Pabna agrarian riots of 1873, Hindu and Muslim tenants fought the zamindars together, and most agrarian struggles after 1919 stayed clear of communal channels, with peasants, workers and the radical intelligentsia building powerful, secular movements that became important constituents of the anti-imperialist struggle.
  • It is worth noting that Hindu zamindars in Bengal acquired control of land not because they were Hindus, but through the historical spread of Islam in Bengal among the lower castes and classes.
    • Hindu zamindars and businessmen acquired economic dominance in Bengal at the beginning of the eighteenth century under Murshid Quli Khan — the most devout of Aurangzeb’s officials — under whose rule more than seventy-five per cent of zamindars, and most taluqdars, were Hindus. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 further reinforced this by eliminating many old Hindu and Muslim zamindar families alike and replacing them with new Hindu men of commerce.
    • Similarly, the predominance of Hindus among bankers, traders and moneylenders in northern India dated back to the medieval period. The dominance these strata acquired under British rule stemmed from their economic role in the colonial system of exploitation, not their religion — colonial history guaranteed their economic dominance, while medieval history had already guaranteed that they would mostly be Hindus.
  • At another level, communalism represented a struggle between two upper classes or strata — belonging to different religions or castes — for power, privileges and economic gains, using communal appeals to mobilize the popular support of their co-religionists. This was, for instance, the case in western Punjab, where Muslim landlords opposed Hindu moneylenders, and in East Bengal, where Muslim jotedars opposed Hindu zamindars.
• A weapon of reactionary classes. Communalism developed, above all, as a weapon of economically and politically reactionary social classes and political forces — semi-feudal landlords and ex-bureaucrats (what Dr. K.M. Ashraf termed the jagirdari classes), merchants and moneylenders, and the colonial state itself.
  • Communal leaders and parties were, in general, allied with these classes, which deliberately encouraged — or unconsciously adopted — communalism for its capacity to distort and divert popular struggles, prevent the masses from understanding the real causes of their condition, block unity along national and class lines, and turn people away from their genuine national and socio-economic interests.
  • Communalism also allowed the upper classes and colonial rulers to unite with sections of the middle classes and harness their politics for their own ends.

British Divide-and-Rule Policy and the Growth of Communalism

• British rule, and its policy of Divide and Rule, bore special responsibility for the growth of communalism in modern India — though this policy could succeed only because of favourable internal social and political conditions.
  • The colonial state, with its immense power, could have promoted national integration; instead, it deliberately promoted divisive forces, using communalism to counter and weaken the growing national movement and the welding of Indians into a nation.
  • Communalism was presented by the rulers as the problem of protecting minorities — Hindu-Muslim disunity, and the need to shield minorities from majority domination, was increasingly offered as the main justification for continued British rule, especially as older theories of the “civilizing mission” and “white man’s burden” grew discredited.
• Communalism was not the only tool of Divide and Rule — every existing social division was encouraged: region against region, caste against caste, language against language, reformer against orthodox, moderate against militant, and Left against Right.
  • It was, however, the communal division that proved most durable and serviceable, eventually becoming the main prop of colonialism, on which the authorities staked everything.
  • In turn, communalism could not have grown enough to divide the country without the powerful support of the colonial state — in this sense, it was the channel through which middle-class politics was placed at the service of colonialism and the jagirdari classes, extending colonialism’s narrow social base into sections of workers, peasants, the middle classes and even the bourgeoisie.
• The British encouraged and nurtured communalism through several specific policies and acts of omission and commission.
  • First, by consistently treating Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs as separate, mutually exclusive and antagonistic communities rather than as a nation, a nation-in-the-making, or a collection of nationalities.
  • Second, by extending official favour and patronage to the communalists.
  • Third, by showing extraordinary tolerance towards the communal press, individuals and agitations.
  • Fourth, by readily accepting communal demands, thereby strengthening communal organizations politically — while the Congress secured none of its demands between 1885 and 1905, Muslim communal demands were accepted in 1906 as soon as they were presented to the Viceroy; the Communal Award of 1932 likewise accepted all major contemporary communal demands, and during the Second World War, the Muslim communalists were given a complete veto over political advance.
  • Fifth, by accepting communal organizations and leaders as the genuine spokespersons for their “communities,” while treating nationalist leaders as representing a mere “microscopic minority.”
  • Sixth, through separate electorates, a crucial instrument in developing communal politics.
  • Lastly, through a policy of inaction — refusing to act against the propagation of virulent communal hatred through the press, pamphlets and rumour, in sharp contrast to the frequent suppression of nationalist propaganda; instead rewarding communal leaders with titles and positions of profit, and remaining relatively inactive and unprepared in the face of communal riots, unlike the vigorous preparations made against nationalist protest movements.
• In sum, so long as the colonial state actively supported communalism, a lasting solution to the communal problem remained difficult — though the overthrow of the colonial state, while necessary, was never by itself a sufficient condition for defeating communalism.

The Hindu Tinge in Early Nationalist Thought

• A further contributory factor was the pronounced Hindu tinge in much nationalist thought and propaganda in the early twentieth century.
  • Many Extremists introduced a strong Hindu religious element into nationalist agitation, emphasizing ancient Indian culture to the exclusion of the medieval period, and attempting to give Indian nationalism a Hindu ideological — or at least idiomatic — underpinning.
    • Tilak used the Ganesh Puja and the Shivaji Festival to propagate nationalism, and the anti-Partition-of-Bengal agitation opened with ceremonial dips in the Ganges.
    • More seriously, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and other writers in Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and other languages often portrayed Muslims as foreigners and tyrants in their novels, plays and poems, tending to identify nationalism with Hindus — literature that alienated literate Muslims from the emerging national movement. A vague Hindu aura also pervaded much nationalist agitation through the use of Hindu symbols, idioms and myths.
  • The nationalist movement, on the whole, remained basically secular in ideology, and young nationalist Muslims like M.A. Jinnah and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had little difficulty joining it — a secularism that grew sturdier once leaders like Gandhi, C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Dr. M.A. Ansari, Subhas Bose, Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad came to the helm.
  • The Hindu tinge was less a cause of communalism than a cause of the nationalist movement’s failure to check its growth — it made winning over Muslims slightly harder, allowed the government and Muslim communalists to keep sections of Muslims away from the movement by warning of “Hindu supremacy,” and created ideological openings for Hindu communalism within nationalist ranks while also encouraging a corresponding Muslim tinge among Muslim nationalists.

The Unscientific View of Indian History

• A communal, distorted and unscientific view of Indian history — particularly its ancient and medieval periods — was a major instrument for spreading communal consciousness and a core constituent of communal ideology itself.
  • The teaching of Indian history from a broadly communal viewpoint, from early in the modern school system, contributed heavily to communalism’s rise, propagated first by imperialist writers and later by others. As Gandhiji wrote: “Communal harmony could not be permanently established in our country so long as highly distorted versions of history were being taught in her schools and colleges, through the history textbooks.” This communal view also spread through poetry, drama, historical fiction, newspapers, pamphlets and oral transmission through the family and the public platform.
  • The trend began in the early nineteenth century with the British historian James Mill, who characterised the ancient period as the Hindu period and the medieval period as the Muslim period — without, of course, characterising the modern period as the “Christian period.” Other British and Indian historians followed his lead.
  • Although Muslim masses were as poor and oppressed as Hindu masses, and there were Hindu as well as Muslim zamindars, nobles and rulers, these writers declared that all Muslims were rulers in medieval India and all Hindus were the ruled — identifying the character of a polity entirely with the religion of its ruler.
    • Later, the culture and society of entire periods were similarly labelled Hindu or Muslim. Hindu communalists readily adopted the imperialist view that medieval rulers were anti-Hindu, tyrannized Hindus and converted them forcibly, and both communalist and imperialist historians portrayed medieval history as one long story of Hindu-Muslim conflict, with permanently distinct Hindu and Muslim cultures.
    • Hindu communalists described medieval Muslim rule as “foreign rule” purely on grounds of religion — the rhetoric of “a thousand years of slavery” was common, even among some nationalists — and relied on the myth that Indian society had reached ideal heights in the ancient period before falling into permanent decay under “Muslim” rule, denying the medieval period’s real contributions to the Indian economy, technology, religion, philosophy, art and culture.
    • Muslim communalists, in turn, harked back to a “Golden Age of Islamic achievement” in West Asia, propagated the notion that all Muslims were rulers — or at least beneficiaries — of medieval “Muslim rule,” defended and glorified even bigoted rulers like Aurangzeb, and evolved their own “fall” theory: that Muslims, while Hindus were supposedly ascendant through the nineteenth century, had “fallen” or declined as a community after losing political power.

Religion, Religiosity and Communalism

• Some authors have attributed communalism’s growth to India’s religious pluralism — but this is not accurate. Communalism does not arise inevitably in every multi-religious society, and religion itself was not the underlying cause of communalism whose removal alone could resolve the communal problem.
  • A crucial distinction must be drawn between religion as a personal belief system and communalism as the ideology of a religion-based socio-political identity. Religion is not the “cause” of communalism, even though communal cleavage is built on religious difference by the communalist — a difference then used to mask social needs, aspirations and conflicts arising in essentially non-religious spheres.
  • Religion enters communalism only to the extent that it serves political needs arising elsewhere. K.M. Ashraf described communalism as “Mazhab ki siyasi dukandari” (political trade in religion) — communalism was not inspired by religion, nor was religion its object; religion was merely its vehicle, used by communalists as a mobilizing factor.
  • Communalism became a genuine popular movement only after 1939, and particularly during 1945–47, once it adopted the inflammatory cry of “religion in danger” — and differing religious practices were often the immediate trigger for communal tension and riots.
• While religion was not responsible for communalism, religiosity — intense emotional commitment to religion, and the tendency to let religious emotion intrude into non-religious spheres of life — was a major contributory factor, opening individuals to the communal appeal even though religiosity itself was not communalism.
  • Secularization, therefore, did not mean removing religion altogether but reducing religiosity — narrowing religion’s sphere increasingly to the private life of the individual.

Part II: The Historical Growth of Communalism (Late 19th Century–1947)

The Near-Absence of Communalism Before the Late 19th Century

• There was hardly any communalism in India before the last quarter of the nineteenth century — Hindus and Muslims fought shoulder to shoulder in the Revolt of 1857, and the notion of Hindu-Muslim distinction, let alone a clash of interests, was largely absent from the press of the 1860s. North Indian newspapers of the time emphasized instead the shared identity of Hindustanees, especially in relation to the European rulers.
• Even when Muslim intellectuals noticed that Muslims in some regions lagged behind Hindus in modern education and government jobs, they blamed the government’s anti-Muslim policy and upper-class Muslim neglect of modern education — not Hindus.

Syed Ahmed Khan and the Origins of Muslim Communalism

• Syed Ahmed Khan, undoubtedly one of the outstanding Indians of the nineteenth century, began his educational work entirely without communal bias.
  • The scientific societies he founded in the 1860s involved both Hindus and Muslims, and the Aligarh College he founded to counter Muslim resistance to modern education received financial support from wealthy Hindus and had a large Hindu component among its faculty and students.
  • Until the founding of the Congress in 1885, Syed Ahmed loudly preached the commonality of Hindus and Muslims. In 1884, he said: “Do you not inhabit this land? Are you not buried in it or cremated on it? Surely you live and die on the same land. Remember that Hindus and Muslims are religious terms. Otherwise Hindus, Muslims and Christians who live in this country are by virtue of this fact one qaum” (nation or community).
• Ironically, organized communalism in India got its start in the 1880s, when Syed Ahmed Khan set it up in opposition to the national movement led by the Congress.
  • In 1887, once the Congress’s anti-imperialist edge became clear, Viceroy Dufferin and Lieutenant-Governor of U.P. A. Colvin launched a frontal public attack on it. Believing that Muslims’ share in administrative posts and professions could grow only through demonstrated loyalty to the colonial rulers, Syed Ahmed joined this attack.
  • He also needed the active support of big zamindars and British officials for Aligarh College. His initial attempt — with Shiva Prasad, Raja of Bhinga, and others — to organize the jagirdari and bureaucratic elements along caste, birth, class and status lines against the rising national movement failed to get off the ground.
• Syed Ahmed then began organizing the jagirdari elements among Muslims as Muslims, or as the Muslim qaum, laying down virtually every basic theme of communal ideology that would later dominate the first half of the twentieth century.
  • A central theme was that Hindus, being a majority, would dominate Muslims and “totally override the interests of the smaller community” under representative, democratic government — hence the British were needed as the “best guardians of Muslim interests,” and Muslims must remain loyal and oppose the Congress.
  • He also introduced the theme of a permanent clash of Hindu and Muslim interests, abandoning his earlier position that India could be considered one nation, and declared the Congress a Hindu body whose objectives were “against Muslim interest.” He criticized the Congress’s principle of social equality between the “lowly” and “highly” born, and opposed its demand for democratic elections, arguing this would be “like a game of dice in which one man had four dice and the other only one” — putting power into the hands of “Bengalis or of Hindus of the Bengali type” and reducing Muslims to “utmost degradation” under “the ring of slavery.”
  • Syed Ahmed and his co-workers demanded safeguards for Muslims in government jobs, legislative councils and district boards, and recognition of their political importance so that their role in councils should not fall below that of Hindus. At the same time, wary of British suspicion of any politicization of Indians, he counselled Muslims to shun agitational politics altogether and remain politically passive, believing agitation would appear anti-government and seditious.
  • The colonial rulers were quick to grasp the logic of communalism and the theory of minority protection, and actively promoted and supported it from the beginning.
• Muslim communalists continued the politics of loyalty after Syed Ahmed’s death, openly siding with the government during the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (1905–6) and condemning Muslim supporters of the movement as “vile traitors” to Islam and “Congress touts.”
• This attempt to keep the growing Muslim intelligentsia loyalist and politically passive was not wholly successful.
  • Badruddin Tyabji presided over the Congress session of 1887, and the number of Muslim delegates rose in the following years; they pointed out that not a single Congress demand was communal or exclusively for Hindus. The nationalist trend continued spreading among Muslims through the end of the nineteenth century, and Abdul Rasul and many other Bengali Muslim intellectuals actively supported the Swadeshi agitation against the Partition of Bengal — the nationalist trend, in fact, remained dominant among Bengal’s Muslims until the late 1920s.

Formation of the All India Muslim League (1907)

• Once the Swadeshi Movement brought mass politics to India, a large section of the Muslim intelligentsia could no longer be kept away from the Congress, and the government felt compelled to offer constitutional concessions, making the earlier policy of political passivity unsustainable.
• At the end of 1907, the All India Muslim League was founded by a group of big zamindars, ex-bureaucrats and other upper-class Muslims, including the Aga Khan, the Nawab of Dacca, and Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk.
  • Founded as a loyalist, communal and conservative organization, the League supported the Partition of Bengal, raised the slogan of separate Muslim interests, demanded separate electorates and safeguards for Muslims in government service, and reiterated all the major themes of communal ideology first enunciated by Syed Ahmed and his followers.
  • A key objective of the League was to prevent the emerging Muslim intelligentsia from joining the Congress; its activities were directed against the Congress and Hindus, not against the colonial regime.

The Parallel Growth of Hindu Communalism

• Hindu communalism was being born at roughly the same time.
  • From the 1870s, a section of Hindu zamindars, moneylenders and middle-class professionals began arousing anti-Muslim sentiment, fully accepting the colonial narrative of “tyrannical” medieval Muslim rule and the “liberating” role of British rule in “saving” Hindus from “Muslim oppression.”
  • In U.P. and Bihar, they gave the Hindi-Urdu question a communal twist, declaring Urdu the language of Muslims and Hindi of Hindus.
  • The anti-cow-slaughter campaign of the early 1890s, though nominally directed at the British (who left their cantonments free to slaughter cattle on a large scale), was in practice aimed at Muslims and repeatedly turned communal, resulting in riots. It died down by 1896, only to be revived more virulently in the second decade of the twentieth century.
  • Hindu communalists also campaigned for a “Hindu” share of legislative and government service seats.
• The Punjab Hindu Sabha was founded in 1909; its leaders, U.N. Mukherji and Lal Chand, laid the foundations of Hindu communal ideology and politics, directing their anger primarily at the Congress for trying to unite Indians into a single nation and for “sacrificing Hindu interests” to appease Muslims.
  • In his booklet Self-Abnegation in Politics, Lal Chand described the Congress as the “self-inflicted misfortune” of Hindus, accused it of making “impossible” demands on the government, and argued that Hindus should instead neutralize the government as a third party in their contest with Muslims — abandoning the Congress altogether. “A Hindu,” he declared, “should not only believe but make it a part and parcel of his organism, of his life and of his conduct, that he is a Hindu first and an Indian after.”
• The All-India Hindu Mahasabha held its first session in April 1915 under the presidentship of the Maharaja of Kasim Bazar, but remained, for many years, a rather sickly counterpart to the Muslim League.
  • This owed much to a broader social difference: zamindars, aristocrats and ex-bureaucrats played a greater — even dominant — role among Muslims and even the Muslim middle classes, whereas among Hindus and Parsis it was increasingly the modern, science- and democracy-oriented intelligentsia and bourgeois elements that acquired social and political hegemony. Reactionary landlords and mullahs continued to dominate among Muslims even as their equivalents lost ground among Hindus — meaning the relative weakness and social backwardness of the Muslim middle class itself contributed to Muslim communalism’s growth.
  • The relative weakness of Hindu communalism owed something else too: the colonial government, banking heavily on Muslim communalism, gave Hindu communalism comparatively few concessions and little support.

Separate Electorates

• The colonial authorities and the communalists together evolved a further powerful instrument for entrenching communalism: separate electorates, introduced under the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1907.
  • Under this system, Muslim voters — and later Sikhs and others — were placed in separate constituencies where only Muslims could stand or vote.
  • This turned elections and legislative councils into arenas of communal conflict: since voters belonged exclusively to one religion, candidates never needed to appeal across religious lines, and could make blatantly communal appeals — training both voters and listeners to think and vote communally, and to frame socio-economic grievances in communal terms. The system of seat reservation and weightage in legislatures, government services and educational institutions had similar effects.
• Communalists on all sides often claimed — as some historical writing still does — that their own communalism was merely a reaction to the other’s, providing a convenient backdoor justification for it. In truth, deciding which communalism came “first” is much like asking whether the chicken or the egg came first — once communalism arose, its different variants simply fed and fattened on one another.

The Rise of Young Nationalist Muslims

• Younger Muslim intellectuals grew increasingly dissatisfied with the loyalist, anti-Hindu leadership of the Muslim League and were drawn to modern, radical nationalist ideas.
  • The militantly nationalist Ahrar movement emerged under Maulana Mohammed Ali, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Hasan Imam, Maulana Zafar Ali Khan and Mazhar-ul-Haq, supported by a section of orthodox ulama, especially of the Deoband school.
  • Another orthodox scholar drawn to the national movement was the young Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, educated at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, who propagated his rationalist, nationalist ideas through his newspaper Al Hilal, launched in 1912 at the age of twenty-four.
• After an intense internal struggle, nationalist young Muslims rose to prominence within the League and grew active in the Congress as well.
  • In 1912, Congress leader M.A. Jinnah was invited to join the League, which adopted self-government as one of its objectives; the Aga Khan resigned as League president the same year.
  • From 1912 to 1924, the young nationalists increasingly overshadowed the loyalists, moving the League closer to Congress policies — though their nationalism, unlike Jinnah’s, was not fully secular, carrying a strong religious and pan-Islamic tinge; rather than opposing the economic and political consequences of modern imperialism directly, they fought it primarily on the ground that it threatened the Caliph (Khalifa) and the holy places, appealing often to religious sentiment.
  • This religious tinge did not immediately clash with nationalism — indeed, it made its adherents anti-imperialist and encouraged the nationalist trend among urban Muslims — but in the long run, it proved harmful, encouraging a habit of viewing political questions through a religious lens.

The Lucknow Pact (1916)

• Positive developments within both the Congress and the League soon led to broad political unity between them, with Lokamanya Tilak and M.A. Jinnah playing important roles.
  • The two organizations held sessions together at the end of 1916 at Lucknow, signing the Lucknow Pact and putting forward common political demands before the government, including self-government for India after the war.
  • The Pact accepted separate electorates and the system of weightage and reservation of seats for minorities in the legislatures.
• While a step forward in many respects — enthusing Indian political opinion — the Pact was also a step backward.
  • The Congress had formally accepted separate electorates and recognized communal politics; the Pact was, moreover, tacitly premised on the notion that India consisted of different communities with separate interests, leaving the door open for the future resurgence of communalism.

Hindu-Muslim Unity: Rowlatt Satyagraha, Khilafat and Non-Cooperation

• The nationalist movement and Hindu-Muslim unity took giant strides forward after the First World War, during the agitation against the Rowlatt Acts and the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation Movements.
  • As if to demonstrate Hindu-Muslim unity in political action to the world, Swami Shraddhanand, a staunch Arya Samajist, was invited by Muslims to preach from the pulpit of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, while Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, a Muslim, was given the keys to the Golden Temple at Amritsar. The country resounded with the cry “Hindu-Muslim ki Jai.”
  • Landlord communalists and ex-bureaucrats increasingly distanced themselves from the Muslim League, which was itself overshadowed by the Khilafat Committee, as many League leaders — and some old Congress leaders too — found it difficult to keep pace with mass politics.
• Though the Khilafat was, at heart, a religious issue, it raised national, anti-imperialist consciousness among Muslim masses and the middle class — and there was nothing inherently wrong in the national movement taking up a demand affecting Muslims alone, just as the Akali Movement affected Sikhs and the anti-untouchability campaign affected Hindus alone.
  • There were, however, real weaknesses. The nationalist leadership only partly succeeded in elevating Muslims’ religious political consciousness to a secular plane — Khilafat leaders relied heavily on appeals to religion and on fatwas and other religious sanctions, strengthening the hold of orthodoxy and priesthood over political minds and reinforcing the habit of viewing politics through religion. By emphasizing Muslim solidarity, this left an opening for communal ideology to grow again later.

1922 Onwards: Resurgence of Communalism and Communal Riots

• The Non-Cooperation Movement was withdrawn in February 1922. As disillusionment set in and Dyarchy became operational, communalism reared its head again, and the country was repeatedly convulsed by communal riots in the years that followed.
  • Old communal organizations revived and new ones formed; the Muslim League became active again, purged of its radical and nationalist elements, with openly loyalist, communal upper-class leadership back at the fore.
  • The Hindu Mahasabha was revived in 1923, openly catering to anti-Muslim sentiment, its stated objective becoming “the maintenance, protection and promotion of Hindu race, Hindu culture and Hindu civilization for the advancement of Hindu Rashtra.” Both Hindu and Muslim communalists worked to instil a psychology of fear — of being deprived, dominated, suppressed or exterminated.
  • These years saw the rise of the Sangathan and Shuddhi movements among Hindus and the Tanzeem and Tabligh movements among Muslims, both aimed at communal consolidation and religious conversion. Nationalists were openly reviled as apostates and enemies of their own religion, and many were unable to withstand this pressure, drifting towards communal or semi-communal positions.
    • The Swarajists were themselves split by communalism — a “responsivist” faction offered cooperation to the government in the name of protecting Hindu interests, and Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malaviya and N.C. Kelkar joined the Hindu Mahasabha to argue for Hindu communal solidarity.
    • The less responsible responsivists and Hindu Mahasabhaites campaigned viciously against secular Congressmen, accusing Motilal Nehru of being anti-Hindu, of favouring cow slaughter and of eating beef. Many old Khilafatists also turned communal — most dramatically Maulanas Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali, who now accused the Congress of trying to establish Hindu rule.
  • The most vicious expression of this resurgence was the wave of communal riots that broke out in major North Indian cities during 1923–24; according to the Simon Commission Report, nearly 112 major communal riots occurred between 1922 and 1927.

The Nationalist Strategy of Top-Level Negotiation

• Despite strenuous efforts, the nationalist leadership failed to evolve an effective line of action against communal forces. Its basic strategy was to seek unity at the top through negotiations with communal leaders — either mediating between rival communal groups or negotiating directly with them over “protection” and “safeguards” for minority interests in seats and jobs.
• The most notable such effort came in 1928, as a response to the Simon Commission, when Indian leaders convened all-India conferences to settle communal issues and draft an agreed constitution.
  • A large gathering of Muslim communal leaders met at Delhi in December 1927 and produced four demands known as the Delhi Proposals: (1) Sind should be made a separate province; (2) the North-West Frontier Province should be constitutionally on par with other provinces; (3) Muslims should have 33⅓ per cent representation in the central legislature; and (4) representation in Punjab and Bengal should follow population proportion — guaranteeing Muslim majorities there — while existing Muslim reservations elsewhere should continue.
  • The Congress’s counter-proposals came in the form of the Nehru Report, drafted by an all-parties committee and put before an All-Party Convention at Calcutta at the end of December 1928. It recommended a federation based on linguistic provinces with provincial autonomy, elections by joint electorates, seats reserved for religious minorities in proportion to population, the separation of Sind from Bombay, and constitutional reform in the North-West Frontier Province.
  • The Report could not secure unanimous approval. While Muslim opinion remained divided, a section of the League and the Khilafatists were willing to accept joint electorates and the rest of the Report, provided three amendments moved by M.A. Jinnah were accepted — two mirroring the third and fourth Delhi Proposals (the first two having already been conceded), and a fresh demand that residuary powers vest in the provinces.
  • A large section of the League, led by Mohammed Shafi and the Aga Khan, along with many other Muslim communal groups, refused to give up separate electorates and rejected the amendments; the Hindu Mahasabha and Sikh League objected strongly to the provisions on Sind, the North-West Frontier Province, Bengal and Punjab, and also rejected the Jinnah amendments; and the Congress leadership itself was unwilling to accept the weak centre implied by Jinnah’s proposals.
  • Most Muslim communalists closed ranks, and Jinnah fell in line with them. Declaring that the Nehru Report represented Hindu interests, he consolidated all existing communal demands into a single document — Jinnah’s Fourteen Points — combining the four Delhi Proposals, the three Calcutta amendments, and demands for the continuation of separate electorates and communal reservation in government services and self-governing bodies. The Fourteen Points were to form the basis of all future communal propaganda in the years that followed.

Weaknesses of the Negotiation Strategy

• The strategy of resolving communalism through pacts with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communal leaders proved a complete failure, suffering from several inherent weaknesses.
  • It tacitly conceded, by implication, the communal leaders’ claim to represent the genuine communal interests of their “communities” — and that such interests and communities existed in real life. Negotiating with them legitimized their politics and made it respectable, while weakening the Congress’s right and will to wage a hard political-ideological campaign against communal parties and individuals.
  • Constant negotiation with Muslim communal leaders weakened the position of secular, anti-imperialist Muslim leaders such as Azad, Ansari and Asaf Ali, and made it harder to expose the communalism or semi-communalism of figures like Malaviya, Lajpat Rai and Mohammed Ali, who often worked within the Congress’s own ranks.
  • Negotiation required generous concessions from the majority to minority communalism on jobs and legislative seats — but communalism was also strong among the Hindu middle classes, who suffered equally from colonial underdevelopment. The Congress leadership found it politically difficult to force concessions to Muslim communalism past Hindu and Sikh communalists; so the failure to conciliate Muslim communalists let it gain strength, while any real concessions produced a Hindu communal backlash.
  • Even where a compromise was achieved through great effort — as with the Lucknow Pact, and to some extent the Nehru Report — it proved temporary, since no single communal leader, group or party commanded enough authority over rival communal factions to sign a lasting agreement.
    • Concessions merely whetted the communalists’ appetite: as soon as one group was appeased, a more “extreme” leader or faction emerged and raised the stakes, forcing even the more “reasonable” leaders to retreat from earlier agreements — precisely what happened repeatedly through 1928–29, with Jinnah a typical example. So long as communal ideology, and the social conditions favouring it, persisted, communal leaders could not be conciliated permanently.
• The real answer lay in an all-out political-ideological opposition to communalism — grounded in a scientific understanding of its ideology, social roots, and social base — combined with taking up the peasants’ cause wherever their class struggle was being diverted into communal channels. This was never fully done, despite the deep commitment to secularism shown by most of the nationalist leadership, from Dadabhai Naoroji to Gandhiji and Nehru. What was needed was to force the debate with communalists onto rational, analytical terrain rather than the terrain of emotion and bias.
  • Gandhiji and the Congress did make Hindu-Muslim unity one of the three basic planks of the nationalist platform, refused at crucial moments to appease Hindu communalists, and Gandhiji repeatedly staked his life for the secular cause — but neither Gandhiji nor the Congress ever provided a deeper structural analysis of the communal phenomenon itself.

Communalism’s Limited Reach through the 1920s and Early 1930s

• Despite the intensified activity of communal parties during the 1920s, communalism had not yet become pervasive in Indian society.
  • Communal riots remained largely confined to cities, and their number, given the size of the country, was not especially large. The Hindu communalists commanded little mass support, and the Muslim communalists’ social base also remained narrow; nationalist Muslims within the Congress still represented a major political force, and the rising trade union, peasant and youth movements were fully secular.
  • The reaction to the Simon Commission further exposed communal weakness, splitting both the League and the Mahasabha between boycott and cooperation. The anti-Simon Commission protests, and then the Second Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–34), swept the country and pushed communal forces into the background once again.
    • Led by the Congress, the Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Hind, the Khudai Khidmatgars and other organizations, thousands of Muslims went to jail, and the national movement, for the first time, engulfed two major Muslim-majority regions — the North-West Frontier Province and Kashmir.

Communal Award (1932) and the Round Table Conferences

• Communal leaders gained fresh prominence at the Round Table Conferences of the early 1930s, where both Muslim and Hindu communalists joined hands with the most reactionary sections of the British ruling classes to seek official backing for their respective “communal interests.”
  • At a 1932 meeting of the House of Commons, the Aga Khan, the poet Mohammed Iqbal, and historian Shafaat Ahmad Khan stressed “the inherent impossibility of securing any merger of Hindu and Muslim, political, or indeed social interests” and “the impracticability of ever governing India through anything but a British agency.”
  • Similarly, in 1933, presiding over the Hindu Mahasabha session, Bhai Parmanand pleaded for cooperation between Hindus and the British Government, declaring: “I feel an impulse in me that Hindus would willingly cooperate with Great Britain if their status and responsible position as the premier community in India is recognized in the political institutions of new India.”
• The communal parties remained weak and narrowly based until 1937; most young Muslim and Hindu intellectuals, workers and peasants joined the mainstreams of nationalism and socialism in the early 1930s.
  • In 1932, seeking to bolster sagging Muslim communalism, the British Government announced the Communal Award, accepting virtually all the Muslim communal demands embodied in the 1927 Delhi Proposals and Jinnah’s Fourteen Points of 1929 — placing the communal forces in an entirely new situation, and raising the question of where they would go from here.

Part III: The Transition to Extreme Communalism (Post-1937)

Liberal Communalism Gives Way to Extremism

• Communalism remained at its second, liberal stage until 1937, when it increasingly assumed a virulent, extremist or fascist form.
  • The liberal communalist held that India consisted of distinct religion-based communities with separate interests that often conflicted, but also accepted that Indian politics was ultimately destined to merge these communities into a single nation — demanding separate communal rights, safeguards and reservations within a broader concept of one Indian nation-in-the-making. Its social base was correspondingly narrow, resting mainly on the upper and middle classes.
• Extreme communalism after 1937 was built instead on the politics of hatred, fear psychosis and irrationality.
  • The recurring motifs of domination and suppression, always present in communal propaganda, now became its dominant theme, unleashing a campaign of hatred against the followers of other religions and declaring Hindu and Muslim interests permanently in conflict. Communalists attacked rival “communities” with fervour, fear, contempt and bitter hatred, using language of oppression, crushing and even physical extermination — and increasingly operated on the principle that “the bigger the lie, the better,” pouring venom on the Congress, Gandhiji and, in particular, their own co-religionists among the nationalists.
  • Communalism now also acquired, for the first time, a genuinely popular base, organizing itself as a mass movement of aggressive communal politics among the urban lower middle classes. Because of its reactionary, upper-class foundations, it could not appeal on the basis of a radical socio-economic programme — so it turned, inevitably, to religion and to irrational sentiments of fear and hatred.

Why Liberal Communalism Turned Extreme

• The radicalization of the Congress and the loss of jagirdari support. With the growth of nationalism, and especially the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–34), the Congress emerged as the dominant force in the 1937 elections, while landlord and other vested-interest parties suffered sharp declines.
  • As youth, workers and peasants turned increasingly leftward, and the national movement’s economic and political programme grew more radical, the zamindars and landlords — the jagirdari elements — found open defence of landlordism politically unviable and switched, by and large, to communalism as their new means of class defence, in U.P. and Bihar as well as Punjab and Bengal.
    • In Punjab, big landlords of West Punjab and the Muslim bureaucratic elite, who had earlier backed the semi-communal, loyalist Unionist Party, gradually shifted their support to the Muslim League between 1937 and 1945, as the League promised more effective protection against Congress radicalism than a purely provincial party could offer. Muslim zamindars and jotedars in Bengal followed a similar path, as did Hindu zamindars, landlords, merchants and moneylenders in northern and western India, who increasingly shifted towards Hindu communal parties. To attract them, Hindu Mahasabha president V.D. Savarkar began condemning the “selfish” class tussle between landlords and tenants, while Punjab’s Hindu communalists became even more active in defending moneylending and trading interests.
  • Communalism as the colonial regime’s last available card. By this stage, virtually every other divisive device the colonial authorities had fostered had lost its political viability. The Non-Brahmin challenge in Maharashtra and South India had fizzled out; the Scheduled Castes and other backward castes could no longer be mobilized against the Congress except in isolated pockets; the Congress Right and Left refused to split; inter-provincial and inter-lingual rivalries had exhausted themselves once the Congress accepted linguistic states and cultural diversity; and efforts to turn zamindars against the national movement had failed outright. The 1937 elections showed nearly every major social and political prop of colonialism shattered — leaving the communal card as the only one left to play, and the rulers threw the full weight of the colonial state behind Muslim communalism, even under a leader, M.A. Jinnah, whose independence and anti-colonialism they distrusted.
  • The Second World War and official backing of the League. The outbreak of war on 1 September 1939 deepened this reliance. As the Congress withdrew its ministries and demanded a firm British declaration of complete freedom after the war along with the immediate transfer of effective power, the government leaned on the Muslim League to counter the nationalist demand and divide Indian opinion, recognizing it as the sole spokesperson for Muslims with an effective veto over any political settlement.
    • It was argued that India could not be granted freedom until Hindus and Muslims united — even as official backing for Muslim communalism made such unity impossible. The League, for its own reasons, agreed to collaborate with the colonial authorities. The Hindu Mahasabha and other Hindu and Sikh organizations also offered wartime support to the government, but the authorities, having already committed fully to Muslim communalism, could no longer divide their loyalties between the two.
  • The electoral failure of 1937 and the turn to mass politics. Both the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha had contested the 1937 elections on liberal communal lines, absorbing much of the nationalist programme except on agrarian issues — yet they fared poorly. The League won only 109 of the 482 seats reserved for Muslims under separate electorates, securing just 4.8 per cent of the total Muslim vote; the Mahasabha fared even worse.
    • The communalists realized they would gradually wither away without adopting militant, mass-based politics. Until then, organized mass movements and cadre-based politics had been the preserve of radical, anti-status-quo nationalists, while conservatives had shied away from them — but the 1930s offered a successful right-wing model of mass politics in the form of Fascism, one that would not frighten away vested interests, and which both Hindu and Muslim communalists chose to emulate.
    • The Congress had also not yet won firm roots among the Muslim masses, adding urgency for the communalists to act before it was too late — a pressure sharpened by the Congress’s own decision, under Jawaharlal Nehru’s guidance, to launch the Muslim Mass Contact Programme.
  • The internal logic of communal concessions. Having already gone quite far in accepting Muslim communal demands through the late 1920s — and with the Communal Award of 1932 and the Government of India Act, 1935, accepting nearly all liberal communal demands, unopposed by the Congress — communal organizations faced a structural dilemma once independence loomed: such concessions carried no guarantee once colonial rule ended and India came under democratic self-government. With their existing demands already conceded, communalists had either to dissolve their organizations or discover new, more extreme demands.
    • Until 1937, the Congress had also permitted liberal Hindu and Muslim communalists to work within its own organization. Under Nehru and the Left’s pressure, the Congress began frontally attacking the communalists, denying them accommodation in the 1934 and 1937 elections, and finally expelling them altogether in 1938 — leaving the Hindu communalists, too, facing political extinction and forced to seek a new basis for survival and growth.

Did the Congress Fail?

• It is not accurate to locate the Congress’s failure on communalism solely in 1947, when it accepted Partition. By that point, perhaps, no real alternative remained.
  • Communalism had already advanced too far; arguably, there was no other solution left short of plunging the country into a civil war, at a moment when the armed forces and police remained under the control of a foreign ruler who was itself prepared to let that war unfold.
• Not every historical situation carries an instant solution, and certainly none existed in 1947. Conditions and forces for resolving a problem like communalism must be built over years, even decades — and this the Congress and the national movement ultimately failed to do.
  • Despite the movement’s commitment to secularism, Gandhiji’s constant emphasis on Hindu-Muslim unity and his willingness to risk his life for it, and Nehru’s incisive analysis of communalism’s socio-economic roots, Indian nationalists never waged a sustained mass ideological-political struggle against communalism grounded in a patient, scientific exposure of its ideological content, socio-economic roots and political consequences.
  • The Congress relied too heavily on top-level negotiations with communal leaders and failed to build a viable, long-term strategy to combat communalism at the political, ideological and cultural levels — a real and lasting failure for which the Congress leadership must be held accountable.