Religion, Communalism and Secular Practice in India

Religion has never been absent from Indian politics, and the interesting question is not whether it is present but what work it is made to do. Communalism is not religiosity; it is an ideology that converts a religious community into a political unit with supposedly common secular interests, and its function is the mobilisation of voters. This note treats religion as a variable in political competition — how it was built into a political category, how it produces violence, and how the state has tried to manage it.

Religion and Politics as a Universal Phenomenon

Religion and politics have always travelled together, and their entanglement is not unique to India. What changed after 1989 was the balance between the two great sources of political identity: the age of ideology gave way to an age of religious assertion, in the West as much as elsewhere.

• The end of the Cold War removed the ideological grid through which conflict had been read for four decades, and religious identity moved into the space it vacated.
  • Across Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam alike, fundamentalist movements recruit young, college-educated professionals, which defeats the idea that religious politics is a residue of backwardness.
• Samuel Huntington’s clash-of-civilisations thesis is the best-known statement of the shift, and is worth stating precisely before it is criticised.
  • A civilisation is the broadest level of cultural identity short of the species itself, defined by language, history, religion, custom and institutions plus subjective self-identification.
  • Future fault lines would run between civilisations rather than between states or ideologies, because civilisational differences are older and less negotiable than differences of regime.
  • His crucial formulation: ideological conflict asked “Which side are you on?” and one could change sides; civilisational conflict asks “What are you?”, which cannot be changed.
• The standard objections are three, and each bears on the Indian case.
  • Civilisations are not unitary actors. They contain more internal conflict than external — the deadliest Indian violence has been between Indians.
  • Edward Said called the thesis a “clash of ignorance” that seals cultures into containers and reproduces the orientalist habit of reading the East through fixed essences.
  • Amartya Sen identifies the “solitarist illusion” — the assumption that a person has one identity trumping all others, when everyone carries many affiliations and it is political work, not nature, that makes one decisive.
• The Indian relevance is direct. India and Turkey are the standard pair: constitutionally secular states where majoritarian mobilisation reshaped secularism in practice without touching the formal commitment.

The clash of civilisations describes a real shift in the vocabulary of conflict and mistakes it for a shift in its causes.

Identity Politics: The Category and the Quarrel Over It

Caste, religion and ethnicity are species of one genus. Identity politics is the principle common to them, and any judgement about communalism rests on a prior judgement: is ascriptive mobilisation a pathology of democracy or an ordinary product of it?

• The standard definition, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is political activity and theorising founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups, aiming to secure the freedom of a marginalised constituency.
  • The feminist, civil rights and gay liberation movements therefore belong to the same family as backward-class and minority mobilisation; Black Lives Matter shows the form is not receding in developed democracies.
  • In India the notion carries a particular charge because it is rooted in the history of separate electorates and partition.

The case against

• Arun Shourie holds that using caste and community as political identity threatens the integrity of the country, resurfacing perpetually as quota demands and generating social discord.
• It fetishises historical injustice. Grievance becomes constitutive of the group, producing a “fossilisation of beliefs” in which the injury must be preserved because the identity depends on it.
• R.K. Debbarma, writing on the North-East, argues that identity politics built on an uncritical evaluation of the “self” is self-defeating, because the politics of the oppressed comes to mirror the oppressor’s.
  • When an identity meant as a “site of resistance” turns oppressive towards the people it claims to emancipate, its boundaries need re-examination.

The case for

• Asghar Ali Engineer treated identity assertion as an indicator of a healthy democracy, showing vulnerable sections making an active bid for a share in power.
  • His formulation is that the issue is never assertion in itself, but how identity functions as “an instrument” to access material gains in a power set-up.

“Democratic process intensifies power struggle, and hence, assertion of various identities assumes vital importance in a democratic set-up. Under authoritarian regime various identities may be suppressed or subordinated but it cannot be done under a democratic regime.” — Asghar Ali Engineer

• Kancha Ilaiah supplies the sociological premise: in postcolonial India democracy was largely confined to the upper castes.
  • Neither in family, market nor political relations, he wrote, had democratisation of civil society occurred, because caste had frozen mobility. Mobilisation is an attempt to unfreeze the order of things.

The resolution

• Identities should be situated historically but held with a view to their own obsolescence: organising under an identity now to overcome a historical injustice, expecting it to become unnecessary once that objective is met.
• The test for any given mobilisation is whether it is expanding access or defending a share. The same identity can do the first in one decade and the second in the next.

Charge	Reply
Divisive, deepens cleavages (Shourie)	Cleavages pre-exist the politics; mobilisation makes them negotiable
Crowds out programmatic competition	Ascriptive groups are how material claims are actually organised
Fetishises injustice	Valid, and met by the obsolescence test — identity as means, not end
Mirrors the oppressor (Debbarma)	Grounds for redrawing boundaries, not for abandoning assertion
Symptom of democratic decay	Engineer: symptom of deepening — identities are suppressed only under authoritarianism

What Communalism Is, and What It Is Not

Communalism in Indian usage is not devoutness, not orthodoxy and not the presence of religion in public life. It is an ideology, and like any ideology its purpose is to mobilise voters.

• Bipan Chandra’s definition is the standard one: communalism asserts that the secular interests of a person are co-extensive with their religious identity.
  • The word doing the work is secular. The claim is not about salvation but about jobs, land, representation and law, and it is their transfer into the religious register that constitutes the ideology.
• His three stages distinguish the mild from the murderous, and the distinction matters because the three are routinely collapsed.

Stage	Content	Marker
Communal	Followers of a religion share common religious and also political and economic interests	Nineteenth century; founding assumption, not yet hostile
Liberal communal	Communities hold their secular interests differ from those of others	Early twentieth century; separate electorates
Extreme communal	Interests are mutually antagonistic and irreconcilable	Culminates in the two-nation theory

• Engineer adds that communalism is political and socio-economic, not religious — its content is competition over resources, with religion supplying only the boundary.
• The material premise follows from this: India has limited resources, so one community’s use of a resource is experienced as coming at another’s cost. Electoral politics and a distribution by numbers convert scarcity into polarisation.

Term	Meaning	Relation to the others
Religiosity	Personal faith and observance	Compatible with secular politics; not a political category
Fundamentalism	Scriptural literalism, directed inward at co-religionists	Can exist without communalism
Communalism	Secular interests follow religious identity	The parent category — an ideology of mobilisation
Communal violence	Riot, pogrom, lynching	The occasional output, not the definition

• The last row carries the analytical weight. Communalism is an everyday condition and violence an episodic one, so measuring communalism by riot counts understates it: a polity can be thoroughly communalised and statistically peaceful.

Why Communalism Is Modern, Not Ancient

Imperial historiography held that Indians had always been communal. That reading is both empirically wrong and politically motivated, and dismantling it is the first step in any account of communal politics.

• Romila Thapar challenges the orientalist discourse: there was no communal violence before the British, though there were localised sectarian conflicts — different in kind, not merely in scale.
  • Pre-colonial conflict was local and between sects, over particular shrines, patronage or precedence, and produced no all-India category of “the Hindus” or “the Muslims” as political actors.
  • Rulers patronised across confessional lines and armies were mixed, which is unintelligible if the antagonism were primordial.
• Edward Said identifies the discourse as a politically motivated project — constructing the Orient as a place of fixed, hostile essences served the legitimating needs of empire.
• The instruments that produced communalism were themselves modern, and they are identifiable.
  • The colonial census from 1871, which classified the whole population by religion and gave each community a countable, competitive existence.
  • Enumeration produced anxiety about relative numbers, which is why the same decades saw shuddhi and tabligh movements to reclaim adherents.
  • Separate electorates from 1909, making religion the constitutional unit of representation.
  • Communal quotas in services and legislatures, making religious identity the currency of claims on the state.
  • Competition for a very small pool of educated employment, giving the new middle classes a concrete stake in communal arithmetic.

Communalism did not survive from the medieval past into the modern state; it was manufactured by the instruments of the modern state itself.

The Colonial Construction of Communal Politics

Year	Development	Significance
After 1857	Policy turns against Muslims, held responsible for the revolt; Sir Syed Ahmad Khan pledges loyalty	The minority becomes the preferred imperial partner, because insecurity makes it dependable
1905	Partition of Bengal on ostensibly administrative grounds	First large-scale use of religious demography as administration
1906	Muslim League founded at Dhaka	Vehicle for separate Muslim political claims
1909	Separate electorates for Muslims	Statutory recognition of Muslims as a distinct political community
1915	Hindu Mahasabha founded	Organised Hindu counter-formation
1919	Electorates extended to Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians	Generalises the principle; denies that Indians are one nation
1923	Savarkar publishes Hindutva	First systematic theory of Hindus as a nation
1925	RSS founded by K.B. Hedgewar	Militant Hinduism to address a sense of vulnerability
1932	Communal Award	Extends the principle to the Depressed Classes, splitting the majority; met by the Poona Pact
1940	Lahore Resolution	The two-nation theory as formal demand
1947	Partition	The extreme communal stage realised, with the subcontinent’s worst communal violence

• Muhammad Iqbal ran the parallel track, holding that the Quran does not recognise territorial nationalism or treat Muslims as one nationality among others: all Muslims form a single ummah, a community of faith rather than soil.
  • The consequence is symmetrical with Hindutva. Both denied that shared territory could constitute a nation, locating nationhood in a cultural-religious community instead.

Savarkar and the theory of Hindutva

V.D. Savarkar was the first Indian thinker to argue systematically that Hindus constitute a nation — a position easily caricatured, and markedly more modernist than the tradition that claims him.

• Two phases. In the first he followed Mazzini and held a composite Indian nationalism not unlike Tilak’s, in which religion mattered but excluded no community. After 1922-23 he turned to Hindu nationalism, presiding over the Hindu Mahasabha from 1938 to 1945.
• His sources were European and rationalist. Through Gopal Ganesh Agarkar he absorbed Spencer, Bentham and Mill, taking three ideas from that tradition.
  • The principle of life struggle — the fittest survive, and nations compete ferociously, so weakness is fatal.
  • Violence is built into nature, which abhors absolute non-violence, so strength must be acquired.
  • Relativist ethics — an action’s rightness is fixed by time, space and object, not by an absolute morality.
• He was not a religious man and eschewed religious practice all his life. A positivist, he accepted only the direct evidence of the senses, rejected scripture as man-made, and dismissed the otherworldly philosophies of Shankara and Ramanuja.
• He was a severe critic of caste: chaturvarna and caste alike were disastrous for Hindu unity, rested on no scientific criterion, produced untouchability, and were historically responsible for Hindu defeats.
• The definition of the nation. Territory alone does not make a nation; a nation is a political community bound by cultural affinities, internally organised on contiguous territory.
  • The pitrabhu / punyabhu test: Hindus regard India as both fatherland and holy land. This excludes Muslims and Christians by definition, their sacred geography lying outside India.
  • Hindu society, not Hindu religion, comes first — a self-enclosed community with a shared past. He launched the shuddhi movement to reconvert converts and sought to purge Marathi of Arabic and Persian words.
• Nation and state distinguished. Nation is a cultural category, state a political one. Non-Hindus may not belong to the nation but are members of the Indian state, with no distinction of religion in franchise, public service or taxation — full citizenship conceded, communal claims refused.
• The critique is internal and severe.
  • Hindus, Muslims and Christians share traditions even in the religious field, so the boundary is not sociologically available.
  • His rationalism was instrumental. Reason and science in Europe emerged against religious prejudice; deploying them to strengthen a religious nationalism inverts their content, and rationality cannot exclude whole communities on presumed loyalty when betrayal can come from any community.
  • The nation/state distinction does not hold, because the two come together as the nation-state; conceding citizenship while withholding nationhood creates the exclusion it denies.

Golwalkar, the motherland and positive Hindutva

M.S. Golwalkar headed the RSS from 1940 to 1973 and gave it a Hindu nationalism differing from Savarkar’s on almost every point except the exclusion.

• Nation as motherland. Where Savarkar reasoned from struggle and utility, Golwalkar reasoned from Indian spiritualism, held superior to Western materialism: India was a holy land destined to lead the world.
• Territorial nationalism rejected as “humbug”. An assortment of peoples does not become a nation by sharing territory; such a group lacks the living spring of culture, and on that principle the country would become a dharmashala.
  • He held territorial nationalism responsible for partition, since it could not bind those who did not regard themselves as part of the nation. His five principles of nationality were common religion, race, language, culture and country.
• On minorities. Non-Hindus had developed extra-territorial loyalties and could enter the nation only by “Indianising” — adopting Hindu cultural and historical traditions as their own without leaving their religion, by persuasion rather than coercion. They would have rights but no privileges.
• On caste he broke with Savarkar. The modern caste system was a degenerated form of varna; varna itself was functional specialisation and a kind of “employment insurance without state intervention”. Untouchability was inhuman, but he undertook no reform programme.
• Negative and positive Hindutva. Negative Hindutva is a reaction to Muslim communalism or Congress secularism, is based on hatred, and is a means to capture power; its adherents, he said, become culturally what they oppose.
  • Positive Hindutva organises Hindus as a social force and does not seek office, since great religions have been corrupted by power and regeneration has come from sages rather than kings. The goal is to remain outside power but control it from outside.
• The critique. The Vedanta he builds on recognises no distinction between Hindu and non-Hindu souls; his cultural nationalism is itself grounded in the territoriality of the motherland; traitors have come from every community; and renouncing political power cannot be reconciled with commitment to a strong nation-state.

	Savarkar	Golwalkar
Intellectual base	Positivism, rationalism, life struggle	Advaitic spiritualism
Modernity	Modernist; science essential	Anti-Westernisation
Caste	Abolitionist	Defends varna; no reform
Criterion of nationhood	Pitrabhu and punyabhu	Five commonalities of religion, race, language, culture, country
The state	State power is crucial	Renounces office, controls power from outside
Minorities	Citizenship, no communal privileges	Indianise; rights but no privileges

The RSS as an organisation

• Founded on 27 September 1925 by K.B. Hedgewar, a follower of Tilak with earlier contacts among Bengal’s revolutionaries, who concluded after non-cooperation that Hindu losses in riots stemmed from Hindu disorganisation.
• Three stated objectives: mobilising Hindus to act coherently; opposing British policy, militant Muslim politics and a Congress seen as appeasing Muslims; and raising the Sangh’s influence in public life, the declared purpose being not to capture power.
• It stayed out of the mass movements — absent from civil disobedience in 1930 and Quit India in 1942 — and was banned in 1948 after Gandhi’s assassination, the ban lifted a year later.
• At its centenary in 2025 it reported over 80,000 shakhas and an estimated four million members, working through affiliated bodies in labour, students and education.
• Christophe Jaffrelot argues against the fascism equation, on the ground that the Sangh’s ideology treats society as an organism to be regenerated by patient grassroots work.

“RSS’s ideology treats society as an organism with a secular spirit, which is implanted not so much in the race as in socio-cultural system and which will be regenerated over the course of time by patient work at grassroots.” — Christophe Jaffrelot

- Decisively, it developed no theory of state and race, which was constitutive of European fascism; its leaders were interested in cultural rather than racial sameness.
- His later observation qualifies this: the organisation has moved toward a **statist style** it once refrained from — precisely the element whose absence grounded the original distinction.

Communal Politics after Independence

The Nehru years: containment rather than resolution

• Until the 1960s there was no major conflagration, though the bitterness of partition persisted. Three reasons account for the containment.
  • Congress hegemony — the party’s position was unchallengeable, so no rival needed a communal card to enter the system.
  • Nehru’s secular agenda, which set the terms of legitimate political speech and made communal appeal costly nationally.
  • The ban on communal organisations after 1948, which disrupted organisational capacity at a formative moment.
• The containment was structural rather than ideological, which is why it did not survive the structure.

The 1960s: the “dangerous decade”

• Selig Harrison called the 1960s India’s “dangerous decade”, and Western commentary widely predicted the experiment would not survive it.
• Rioting returned to industrial towns — Jabalpur, Ranchi, Ahmedabad, Aligarh and Nagpur — alongside linguistic movements, opposition to Hindi and demands for linguistic states.
• The underlying process was the erosion of the Nehruvian consensus: as Congress hegemony weakened after 1967, competition became genuinely contested and identity became the cheapest instrument for building a bloc.

The 1970s and 1980s: Punjab, and the double appeasement

• Punjab was the worst theatre of religion-based violence of the period, and the instrumental logic is what belongs here: fundamentalist figures were cultivated to weaken the Akalis, the strategy escaped its authors, and the sequence ran to Operation Blue Star (June 1984), the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the anti-Sikh violence that followed.
  • The accountability record is the durable grievance. Multiple commissions produced few prosecutions; the first conviction of a senior political figure came only in December 2018, when the Delhi High Court convicted Sajjan Kumar, with a second life sentence in February 2025 — four decades on, and alongside acquittals in other cases.
• Congress in the 1980s practised what is fairly called double appeasement — the clearest instance of a secular party trading in religious currency on both sides.
  • Shah Bano, 1985. The Court’s award of maintenance to a divorced Muslim woman was nullified by the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986, passed to placate orthodox opinion. Its doctrinal afterlife belongs to the personal-law debate; as a political episode it is the moment secular credentials were traded for a bloc.
  • The Ram Janmabhoomi gates were opened in 1986 and the shilanyas permitted in 1989 — a counter-concession to Hindu opinion offsetting the first.
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta reads this as evidence that the politics of Hindutva is not recent: Congress has long practised soft Hindutva, the Ayodhya gates and the Shah Bano reversal being his central examples, alongside using Sikh fundamentalists against the Akalis and then Hindu sentiment against Sikhs.

Mandal to Mandir, and the demolition

• V.P. Singh’s government could manage neither the coalition, nor the insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir, nor the economy, and announced implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in 1990 to consolidate a base.
• Mandal divided Hindus along caste lines, dissolving precisely the constituency Hindutva required as a single bloc. The Mandir agenda was the counter-mobilisation — a cleavage running across caste rather than along it.
• The Rath Yatra of 1990 carried the movement into the northern heartland; the Babri Masjid was demolished on 6 December 1992.
  • The Liberhan Commission, appointed ten days after the demolition, reported on 30 June 2009 after seventeen years and forty-eight extensions. It found the demolition not spontaneous — the build-up was “meticulously planned” — and indicted senior political and organisational leaders.
  • The failure of political will at the centre compounded the ideological failure, which is why 1992 is read as a failure of the secular state and not merely a victory for its opponents.
• The 1992-93 Bombay riots followed in two phases and were examined by the Srikrishna Commission, appointed in January 1993 and reporting in February 1998.
  • Roughly 900 died, the majority Muslim, with over 2,000 injured and around 100,000 displaced.
  • It found the second phase driven by provocative processions, documented systemic police bias and inaction, and found that Shiv Sena shakhas operated as de facto command centres. The state government rejected the report; prosecutions began only after a change of government, and convictions have been few.
• Gujarat 2002, after the Godhra train burning, was the largest single episode of communal killing since independence.
• Muzaffarnagar 2013 marks a structural shift: violence historically urban, read through the sociology of the industrial town, moved into rural western Uttar Pradesh, drawing on agrarian caste networks. Delhi 2020 returned it to the metropolis.

Phase	Political condition	Characteristic form
1947-mid 1960s	Congress hegemony; 1948 ban on communal organisations	Latent bitterness; no major episode
Mid 1960s-1970s	Erosion of one-party dominance after 1967	Urban industrial riots
1980s	Breakdown of the Congress system	Punjab; double appeasement; Ayodhya gates
1990s	Mandal-Mandir realignment; coalition era	Rath Yatra; 6 December 1992; Bombay
2000s-2010s	Consolidation of a national Hindutva vote	Gujarat 2002; rural shift at Muzaffarnagar
2014 onward	Single-party majority; majoritarian agenda	Fewer large riots, more systemic forms

Explaining the Rise of Hindu Nationalism

• Thomas Blom Hansen’s The Saffron Wave is the indispensable account, and its central move is to refuse both obvious readings.
  • Hindu nationalism is neither mainly religious nor strictly political; it must be placed within the larger transformation of democratic governance.
  • It is a product of democratic deepening, not a reaction against democracy. The same transformation that enabled lower-caste mobilisation and protections for minorities generated the anxieties on which it fed.
  • It is a conservative populism articulating the anxieties of the amorphous Indian middle class, attracting both privileged groups fearing encroachment and “plebeian” and impoverished groups seeking recognition through a rhetoric of cultural pride, order and national strength.
• James Manor adds the supply-side point: with Congress in decline the alternatives were Left or BJP, and the Left lacked imagination and leadership.
• Jaffrelot locates the mechanism in perception: Congress policies were widely read as minority appeasement, and the former umbrella party was reduced to a party of minorities.
  • On the fate of secularism he argues erosion came from two directions — the rise of majoritarianism and the self-inflicted damage done to secular nationalism by parties using religion opportunistically.
  • He also insists Indian secularism is not an invention of post-1947 leaders: rulers promoting coexistence run from Ashoka through Akbar to Gandhism, making the model the by-product of a civilisation rather than an import.
• Suhas Palshikar raises the systemic question — whether India has moved to a “BJP system”: a dominant party that is centripetal, drawing civil society organisations, local elites and even opponents into its ambit, combining ideological centrality with electoral superiority.
• The counter-consideration is that 2024 returned a coalition government rather than a single-party majority; a dominance thesis must survive an election in which the dominant party needs allies.

Hindu nationalism grew inside a deepening democracy rather than against it, which is why it cannot be explained as a residue of tradition.

The Four Schools: Explaining Communal Violence

Four families of explanation compete, each identifying a real mechanism. The useful question is not which is correct but which applies where, since different models fit different regions.

School	Core claim	Exponent	Implication
Essentialist	Hindus and Muslims are inherently antagonistic	Louis Dumont; the colonial narrative; Jinnah	Violence is inevitable; only separation resolves it
Instrumentalist	Elites choose mobilisation on religious lines; people are not communal	Bipan Chandra	Violence is manufactured; normalcy returns
Institutionalist	Policy built on religious identity manufactures insecurity	Asghar Ali Engineer	The remedy is policy design, not exhortation
Social constructivist	Communities carry mental maps and stereotypes	Drawn from contact theory; no single exponent	The remedy is contact; the problem is a trust deficit

• The essentialist school is least defensible but not merely historical: it is the implicit premise of both majority and minority communalism.
• The instrumentalist school carries the strongest normative payload. If people are not communal and elites are, communal violence is a failure of leadership and policing, not a fact of Indian society.
• The institutionalist school explains a specific and important phenomenon — the sense that the other community is being appeased. Where policy is organised by religious category, each community can point to concessions made to the other.
• The constructivist school explains persistence in the absence of contact. Communities live inside stereotypes they have no occasion to falsify, and the trust deficit produced by segregated residence, schooling and marriage is what elites subsequently mobilise.

Paul Brass and the institutionalised riot system

Paul Brass’s work on Aligarh is the strongest instrumentalist statement available, and it changes the question. Instead of asking “what causes riots?” he asks who produces them, how and when.

• Riots are not spontaneous events but organised political productions, staged by players with defined roles and a division of labour.

“Dramatic productions in which what is spontaneous can occur only because the scene has been prepared with numerous rehearsals by various players with defined roles and division of labour.” — Paul Brass, on Hindu-Muslim violence

• They are better described as pogroms: targeted violence executed in a professional manner.
• The institutionalised riot system operates in three stages.
  • Preparation or rehearsal — the role of “fire-tenders”, who keep communal feeling warm through speeches and rumour, ensuring the atmosphere is never free of communal tension.
  • Precipitation — violence erupts; the role of “conversion specialists”, who turn an ordinary quarrel or accident into a communal incident.
  • Explanation — the blame game begins, and preparation for the next episode starts.
• The political economy of the riot is that all parties benefit from polarisation, because voters of every party consolidate. Hence the most dangerous period is near elections.
• The damaging implication is that riots are preventable. District administration has enough power to stop a riot within a few hours where it chooses to; persistence therefore indicates decision, not incapacity.
• Dipankar Gupta’s “picnic riots” captures the logic from below: violence is followed by rewards and celebration for those who did the work, so participation is remunerated and a supply of participants is always available.

Ashutosh Varshney and the civic-engagement counter-thesis

Varshney’s Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life challenges a purely elite-driven account by asking what Brass cannot easily answer: why do some cities riot while similar cities do not?

• The distribution of violence is extraordinarily concentrated.
  • Over half a century a handful of cities accounted for close to half of all deaths while holding under a fifth of the urban population.
  • Most of urban India has not been riot-prone, and rural India, with the bulk of the population, contributed a small share.
• The method is paired comparison: cities matched on demography and history, one with a record of violence and its partner without — Aligarh with Calicut, Hyderabad with Lucknow, Ahmedabad with Surat.
• The finding is inter-communal civic engagement, with a crucial refinement: not all engagement is equally protective.
  • Everyday or quotidian engagement — neighbours visiting, children playing together — sustains peace in villages, where face-to-face intimacy is dense enough.
  • Associational engagement — business associations, trade unions, professional bodies, cadre parties, integrated NGOs — is sturdier, and cities require it because urban scale makes personal ties insufficient.
  • Associational forms survive deliberate attempts to polarise; everyday ties often do not, because they carry no institutional interest in peace.
• The mechanism is concrete: where the two communities are economically interdependent through associations, those associations police rumour, coordinate with the administration and impose costs on their own provocateurs.

Steven Wilkinson and the electoral incentive

Wilkinson’s Votes and Violence supplies the piece both leave underspecified: why the state sometimes protects and sometimes does not.

• At the town level, riots are likelier where party competition for a minority’s votes makes polarisation electorally rewarding for one competitor.
• At the state level, whether a riot is allowed to run turns on whether the state government needs minority votes. Where the governing party depends on minority support, or fragmentation makes those votes pivotal, the state orders effective preventive action early.
• The conclusion is uncomfortable. Riots stop when governments want them to stop, and governments want that when the arithmetic makes minority protection profitable. Communal violence is a function of the party system, not of social distance.

	Brass	Varshney	Wilkinson
Question	Who produces riots	Why some cities riot	When the state prevents riots
Unit	The riot system in a town	Paired cities and civic networks	Electoral incentives, town and state
Key concept	Institutionalised riot system	Associational vs everyday engagement	Incentive to protect minorities
Prevention lies with	District administration	Inter-communal associations	The state’s vote calculus

• The three are complementary rather than rival: Brass explains the machinery, Varshney whether it finds purchase, Wilkinson why it is sometimes dismantled and sometimes left running.

Secularism as Political Practice

The constitutional architecture of Indian secularism is a separate subject. What belongs here is secularism as it operates in politics — the model India chose, the objections it attracts, and how it works in an election.

Western models and the Indian departure

• The European origin is specific and non-transferable. Secularism emerged from the struggle between an organised Church and the state, sharpened by the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, and settled at Westphalia into a modus vivendi that became a principle of political order.
  • A second element reinforced it: belief became a matter of private conscience, also one of the foundations of the theory of rights.
• India had neither an organised church nor a continuously present centralised state; the Maurya and Mughal empires were episodic. The church-state clash is alien to Indian experience, which is why the route had to differ even where the destination did not.

	France	United States	India
Principle	Laïcité — strict separation	Wall of separation	Principled distance
State entry into religion	Barred	Barred, including non-preferential aid	Permitted on principle — reform, regulation, funding
Group rights	Rejected; only individual citizens	Minimal group recognition	Explicit community rights (Article 30)
Problem addressed	Church power over the state	Establishment and religious liberty	Intra-religious oppression and inter-religious domination
Nature of doctrine	Single-value, procedural	Substantially procedural	Multi-value, contextual

• The Indian departure is deliberate. The Constitution partially separates — no taxes for promoting a religion (Article 27), no religious instruction in wholly state-funded institutions (Article 28) — while permitting extensive overlap elsewhere.
  • Personal law varies with religion; religious endowments sit in the Concurrent List; the state administers major Hindu temple endowments and funds minority schools; Article 25(2)(b) authorises social reform legislation.
  • State engagement is unequal across religions, the reform power falling most heavily on Hindu institutions — the strongest ground for the charge of asymmetry, and the horn of the contradiction Partha Chatterjee identifies.

Rajeev Bhargava’s defence

• Bhargava’s three models locate the Indian case: hyper-substantive separation in the name of values like autonomy and reason; ultra-procedural separation in the name of value-free procedure; and contextual secularism, meaning principled, non-absolutist separation resting on multiple values.
• Principled distance names what India does. The state is institutionally separated from religion but engages with it through law and social policy, and may engage or disengage, negatively or positively, as the case demands.
  • It draws on Dworkin’s equal concern, consistent with differential treatment — so treating religions differently is not itself a departure from equality.
  • Negative engagement bans untouchability under Article 17; positive engagement funds minority institutions without discrimination.
• Five distinguishing features: its multi-value character; principled distance rather than mutual exclusion; a contextual moral reasoning that admits multiple secularisms; active hostility to some aspects of religion combined with active respect for others; and attention to intra-religious oppression and inter-religious domination together.
• Instability is a design feature. A multi-value doctrine has no lexical ordering of its values, so each case is settled by contextual reasoning rather than by rule.
• His key distinction for the practice layer: Indian secularism aims at the de-politicisation of religion but not its de-publicisation. Religion may be public; it may not be the currency of political power.

The critics, and the replies

• T.N. Madan argues that in South Asia religion is a way of life and secularisation has not occurred, so secularism as a credo of life is impossible, as a basis of state action impractical, and against fundamentalism impotent. He calls it a social myth.
• Ashis Nandy’s anti-secularist manifesto attacks the modern state rather than religion. The state banishes rival ideologies to the periphery and hierarchises the two domains, typing religious affiliation as an inferior way of being, which inhibits dialogue.
  • His positive claim: the traditions of tolerance encoded in the everyday life of Indian faiths are the better resource, and cosmopolitan intellectuals have failed to respect them.
• Partha Chatterjee holds that secularism requires the norm of toleration, and identifies a contradictory movement — secularisation of the public sphere alongside reformist intervention in the socio-religious sphere, mostly of Hindus. “Positive secularism” adopted to deflect the charge of being anti-secular takes the shape of pseudo-secularism.
• What unites the three is the claim that the external threat is a symptom of a deeper internal crisis: a flawed modernisation and an exaggerated faith in the modern state.
• D.E. Smith’s classic definition set the academic terms: a secular state guarantees freedom of religion, treats citizenship as unaffected by belief, and maintains separation of state and religion.
  • Three relations follow — individual-to-religion, from which the state is excluded (the libertarian ingredient); individual-to-state, from which religion is excluded (the egalitarian ingredient); and state-to-religion, requiring mutual exclusion.
  • India possessed the first two and lacked the third, so Smith doubted the project’s prospects. Marc Galanter replied that the approach is ethnocentric.
• Neera Chandhoke criticises from inside the model. Secularism cannot be subtracted from the wider context of democracy, equality and rights.
  • Her sharpest point here: the Indian model itself left space for the legitimation of communalism, because its engagement with religion let a communal project brand the constitutional model “pseudo-secular” and its own as genuinely even-handed.
• Akeel Bilgrami argues secularism must be defended as a substantive political value negotiated among a society’s own religious communities, not as an Archimedean principle outside all commitments — which is why it becomes fragile when that argument is abandoned.
• The replies matter, because the critique has become the default position.
  • The need arose internally — from the retreat of caste panchayats before elected ones, the widening circle of marriage choice, the constitutional promise of dignity. A principle answering an internal need is neither alien nor an imposition.
  • The difficult is not the impossible: Indian secularism takes a zigzag route through setbacks, which describes difficulty, not impossibility.
  • It threatens only the coercive aspects of religion that undermine dignity, and special minority rights are protection against numerical disadvantage, not privilege.

Secularisation and cultural secularisation

• Secularism and secularisation are distinct, and conflating them causes most of the confusion here. Secularism is a normative political doctrine; secularisation is a sociological process by which religion’s hold over social life declines.
• Cultural secularisation names that process as it operates on culture — the loosening of religious sanction over custom, ritual, art and daily life, and their shift to a profane or aesthetic register.
  • Its Indian markers: the expanding circle of endogamy; the replacement of caste panchayats by elected panchayats; the conversion of festivals into public and commercial occasions; and the secularisation of caste into an interest group.
  • It is uneven and partly reversible. Rituals shed doctrinal content while gaining political content — a procession may become less devotional and more assertive at once, which is why cultural secularisation does not by itself produce religious peace.
• Madan’s argument turns on the relation between the two: secularism cannot be built on rational avoidance of religion in the absence of secularisation, and the attempt has instead provoked revivalism on both sides.
• The counter-position is that the process is real but slow, and India is a transitional society. In transition, customary mechanisms of conflict resolution become inadequate — built for small local disputes, they cannot work at the scale of modern politics — and that inadequacy is itself the argument for secularism.

The constitutional apparatus in brief

• The Preamble’s “secular” was inserted by the 42nd Amendment (1976), making explicit a commitment already present in the design.
• Articles 25 to 28 guarantee freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation, subject to public order, morality and health, with power to regulate secular activity associated with religious practice.
• S.R. Bommai (1994) held secularism part of the basic structure, present before the 42nd Amendment, and made communal politics by a state government a ground for action under Article 356.
• The essential religious practices doctrine requires courts to decide what is integral to a religion before protecting it — criticised for turning judges into theologians, and central to disputes over temple entry and religious dress.

Religion in Electoral Practice

The Representation of the People Act contains the one provision designed to keep religion out of Indian elections. Its history is a study in the limits of legal instruments against political incentives.

• Section 123(3), Representation of the People Act 1951 makes it a corrupt practice for a candidate or agent to appeal for votes on the ground of religion, race, caste, community or language, or to ask electors to refrain from voting for a rival on those grounds.
• The 1995 Hindutva judgments narrowed it decisively. In Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo v. Prabhakar Kashinath Kunte the Court held that using the word Hindutva in an election speech would not by itself attract disqualification, reasoning that “Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life”.
  • The consequence is that the dominant idiom of majoritarian mobilisation was placed outside the provision’s reach while remaining fully available inside campaigns.
• Abhiram Singh v. C.D. Commachen (January 2017) widened it on a different axis. Seven judges held 4:3 that “his” in Section 123(3) covers not only the religion of the candidate and his agent but also the religion of the voter.
  • The majority read the section purposively, holding elections a secular exercise corrupted by appeals to any listed identity.
  • The minority warned that so broad a reading would silence legitimate discussion of the grievances of religious and caste groups, which are the substance of much democratic politics.
  • It did not revisit the Hindutva judgments, and expressly declined to — which is why it disappointed those who read 1995 as favouring one community.
• The provision is close to unenforceable, for structural rather than accidental reasons.
  • Appeals are made obliquely — through symbol, dress, dog-whistle and reference to festivals, food and burial grounds — none a direct appeal on the ground of religion.
  • Enforcement runs through election petitions in high courts, which take years, often outlasting the term of the legislature concerned.
  • The remedy is disqualification of one candidate, no answer to a party-wide strategy.
  • The Election Commission’s real-time powers impose reputational rather than electoral costs.

The vocabulary of the argument

• “Pseudo-secularism” entered mainstream speech as a charge that the constitutional model systematically favours minorities, and it has been effective: Chandhoke observes that a communal project succeeded in establishing the Congress model as pseudo-secular and its own as genuinely secular.
  • Shourie’s version is the argued one: secularism means equality before the law, which a model of differentiated group rights does not deliver. The reply is that formal equality where numbers are unequal does not produce equal outcomes.
• “Appeasement” is the operative sibling term, and the institutionalist school explains its durability: where policy is organised by religious category, each community can experience itself as discriminated against simultaneously.
• Mehta sharpens this: the model appears rational in theory but in practice legitimises vote-bank politics, letting a party placate one group or another at different times — promoting communalism in the garb of secularism and keeping all communities insecure at all times.

Majority and minority communalism as mirror phenomena

• The two are structurally identical, asymmetric in consequence. Both assert that secular interests follow religious identity; but majority communalism can capture the state, minority communalism at most a bargaining position.
• Moin Shakir identified the resulting trap: minorities have had very limited choices, obliged to select between paternalist formations on one side and casteist and communal parties on the other, which produces defensive rather than programmatic voting.
• The self-limiting logic of confessional minority politics develops from that trap.
  • Minority communalism begins as identity assertion, but the community becomes obsessed with its own identity and cultural moorings and alienates itself from the rest of society.
  • Confessional nomenclature is itself a constraint: parties named for the community — Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen are the instances — cap their own prospects and, by rendering the community’s politics legible as religious politics, strengthen the Islamophobia they organise against.
  • The prescription that follows is a more secular approach, integration rather than alienation, and the pursuit of equality and justice through pluralistic politics.
• The point that follows: minority communalism is self-limiting and majority communalism self-reinforcing, because where politics is organised on religious lines under first-past-the-post, numbers settle the matter.

Religion and the Vote

• The 2014 result generated a claim that identity voting was over — that voters had turned to vikas in place of caste and religion. The systematic evidence does not support it.
• Abhijit Banerjee, Amory Gethin and Thomas Piketty compared national and state election data from 1962 to 2014 against electoral surveys and social spending, and found that identity and religious-ethnic conflict, rather than economic issues, determine India’s electoral choices.
  • Support bases sort accordingly: the BJP and allied parties draw disproportionately from Brahmins and forward castes, while Congress and the left draw from Muslims and lower-caste Hindus.
• Shreyas Sardesai argued from National Election Study data that religious polarisation was at the core of the 2019 verdict, an outcome produced by vote consolidation on religious lines — the majority community backing the governing alliance in unprecedented proportion, the main minorities staying away.
  • The finding underneath: the alliance overcame caste hierarchies among Hindus to construct a single category of Hindu voters versus others, which distinguishes this from ordinary vote-bank politics.
  • His data did not support the stronger claim that Hindu support was driven by anti-minority sentiment — consolidation and hostility are not the same mechanism.
• A structural explanation for identity voting is the information deficit: voters lack usable information on legislators’ performance, so ascriptive identification substitutes for evaluation. The consequence is lower legislator quality — identity voting is a cause of poor representation, not only a symptom.

What 2024 showed

• Muslim voting consolidated further behind the opposition alliance — post-poll evidence indicates a large majority of Muslim voters backed it, a higher share than in 2019, though part of that rise reflects a changed alliance.
• The Muslim vote is not a bloc but a set of state-level blocs.
  • Congress took the largest national share, but the pattern is regional — overwhelming majorities to the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, with only a marginal share to the BJP.
• Survey evidence adds the perceptual dimension, where the mirror structure of communalism becomes measurable.
  • A majority of Muslim respondents report feeling not as safe as any other citizen, while most Hindu respondents believe Muslims are as safe as anyone else — the two are describing different countries.
  • A substantial minority of Hindu respondents believe Muslims are “unnecessarily appeased”. The institutionalist prediction is exactly this: both perceptions coexist and each is sincerely held.
  • Most Muslim respondents want better and more articulate leadership, and many attribute under-representation partly to absent leadership within the community — supporting the self-limitation argument from within.
  • Pre-election priorities among Muslim voters were unemployment, price rise and development, evidence that the vote is defensive rather than confessional.
• The counter-evidence on welfare delivery is genuine. The rise of “new welfarism” — direct, individualised transfers delivered through technology-enabled systems bypassing local intermediaries — has produced the labharthi or beneficiary voter.
  • The mechanism is that welfare is detached from rights-claiming and attached to a leader, creating a direct leader-to-beneficiary relationship; survey evidence shows voters increasingly credit schemes to the national leadership rather than to the state that delivers them.
  • Yamini Aiyar describes the model as “techno-patrimonial”, arguing it converts rights-bearing citizens into passive recipients and weakens accountability even as it wins elections.
  • The synthesis: welfare and identity are not competing explanations but a combination. Benefits secure a cross-caste floor; identity supplies the coalition’s boundary.

The representation deficit

• Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha has fallen for four decades and now sits far below population share.
  • Peak: 49 Muslim MPs in 1980, about 9 per cent of the House.
  • 2014: 23 — the lowest on record. 2019: 27. 2024: 24, around 4.4 per cent.
  • Muslims are roughly 14 per cent of the population, so representation runs at under a third of population share, below 5 per cent for three consecutive Lok Sabhas.
• The mechanism is candidate selection, not voter prejudice. Parties nominate few Muslim candidates in winnable seats on the calculation that one costs majority votes — a calculation that is self-fulfilling, and that is why representation falls even where the opposition alliance gains.
• The Sachar Committee (2006) produced the authoritative account of Muslim socio-economic status and remains the benchmark.
  • Public employment was “abysmally low at all levels” — about 3 per cent in the IAS, 4 per cent in the IPS, 6 per cent among police constables. Participation in security-related employment was around 4 per cent, against 12 per cent for SC/ST and 23 per cent for OBCs.
  • Literacy 59.1 per cent against a national 64.8; about 4 per cent held graduate degrees against 7 nationally, with the highest unemployment among Muslim graduates.
  • Around 31 per cent were below the poverty line against a national 22.7, and bank credit per account roughly a third of the general population’s.
  • Its recommendations included an Equal Opportunity Commission, a diversity index, revision of delimitation practice and recognition of madrasa degrees. The diagnosis entered the vocabulary and some scholarship schemes followed, but the Commission was never established.
• The Ranganath Misra Commission on religious and linguistic minorities was constituted in October 2004, reported in May 2007 and was tabled in Parliament in December 2009.
  • It recommended 15 per cent reservation for minorities, 10 per cent of it for Muslims; alternatively an 8.4 per cent sub-quota from the existing OBC quota; and that Dalits converting to Islam or Christianity retain Scheduled Caste benefits.
  • Nothing came of it: a related sub-quota was struck down, and the Union government has since disowned the report. Scheduled Caste status for Dalit converts remains before the Supreme Court.

A community can consolidate its vote completely and still lose ground in the legislature, because representation is decided by nomination and not by turnout.

Contemporary Developments

• Ayodhya.M. Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das, 9 November 2019 — five judges unanimously awarded the entire 2.77 acres to a trust to be constituted for temple construction, and directed five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya for the Sunni Central Waqf Board.
  • The Court held both the 1949 installation of idols and the 1992 demolition unlawful — a finding essential to its account of itself as consistent with secularism. It declined to treat the Archaeological Survey report as decisive of title, ruins beneath a building not by themselves establishing demolition by a hostile power.
  • The temple was consecrated in January 2024, with full state participation, weeks before the general election.
  • On whether a court may direct construction of a place of worship without the state fostering religion, Upendra Baxi answers that the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act 1993 permitted vesting the land in a trust.
• The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act 1991 is the pivot of the current phase. It freezes the religious character of every place of worship as it stood on 15 August 1947, abates pending suits, and expressly exempts Ayodhya under Section 5.
  • The Ayodhya judgment described the Act as imposing a positive obligation on the state to maintain that character and as embodying constitutional secular values — language reading as a bar on further claims.
  • Its constitutionality is nonetheless under challenge. On 12 December 2024 a special bench stayed the registration of further suits and the ordering of surveys, freezing a proliferating category of litigation; the matter remains pending before a three-judge bench.
• The pending disputes show what the Act was meant to prevent.
  • Gyanvapi, Varanasi — suits on ownership and religious character, a contested Archaeological Survey report, and status quo orders covering both prayer in the mosque and worship in the cellar.
  • Krishna Janmabhoomi-Shahi Idgah, Mathura — a challenge to a 1968 compromise decree, the suits consolidated before the Allahabad High Court.
  • Sambhal Jama Masjid, where a survey order in November 2024 was followed by deaths in police firing.
• The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 opened a path to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan entering before 31 December 2014, excluding Muslims.
  • The objection is that citizenship by religious category is inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the Constitution. The defence is that it addresses religious minorities in three states with a state religion, affects no Indian citizen, and leaves registration and naturalisation open to Muslims.
  • The rules were notified in March 2024, four years after enactment. Roughly 200 petitions are pending; the Court refused an interim stay and has listed final hearing on pan-India and Assam-Tripura tracks.
  • The second track exists because the Act interacts with the Assam Accord cut-off of 24 March 1971, upheld when Section 6A was sustained 4:1 in October 2024.
• Anti-conversion laws have spread rapidly and now cover a substantial share of the country.
  • The older statutes — Odisha (1967), Arunachal Pradesh (1978), Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat (2003) — were framed around force, fraud and allurement.
  • From Uttarakhand (2018) onward the newer generation adds conversion by marriage, reverses the burden of proof onto the accused, requires prior notice to the District Magistrate, and raises sentences. Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Karnataka followed; Rajasthan legislated in 2025 and further states in 2026, taking the total past a dozen.
  • The objection is that prior notice and a reversed burden encumber Article 25’s right to propagate and the Article 21 right to choose a partner and a faith. The challenge has been pending since 2020 with no ruling — the delay itself functions as a decision, since the laws operate meanwhile.
• The Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025 made the largest change to religious endowment law in decades: it removed “waqf by user” for future dedications, required that a waqf be created only by someone who has practised Islam for five years, and provided for non-Muslim members on the Waqf Council and State Boards.
  • On 15 September 2025, Chief Justice B.R. Gavai and Justice A.G. Masih declined to stay the Act wholly but stayed the five-year requirement in Section 3(r) and parts of Section 3C, and capped non-Muslim membership at four on the Central Council and three on State Boards.
  • The main challenge remains pending, turning on Articles 26(b) and 26(d) — a denomination’s right to manage its own affairs and administer its property.
• The hijab litigation produced a split verdict in October 2022, and the matter awaits a larger bench.
  • Justice Hemant Gupta upheld the Karnataka restriction: a secular school may prescribe a uniform, and the practice failed the essential-practices test.
  • Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia would have set it aside, holding the essential-practices inquiry not required, the question one of choice and dignity under Articles 19(1)(a) and 21, and the effect to drive girls from education.
• Cow protection and lynching. In Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India (17 July 2018) the Court called mob violence an assertion of “mobocracy” and issued three sets of directions.
  • Preventive — a senior police officer as nodal officer in every district, identification of vulnerable areas, action against inflammatory material. Remedial — fast-track courts, compensation schemes, witness protection. Punitive — departmental action against officials who fail to act.
  • It recommended that Parliament enact a special law against lynching. No central law has followed, a few states have legislated, and compliance has been uneven — which is why the judgment is cited more often than it is enforced.
• Hate speech. In Shaheen Abdulla v. Union of India the Court directed in October 2022 that police in specified states register FIRs suo motu, without waiting for a complaint, warning that hesitation would invite contempt.
  • In April 2023 it extended this to all states and union territories. Enforcement has been sporadic, and the Court has declined to frame comprehensive guidelines.
• The violence data has changed shape, and the shift is analytically significant.
  • Independent monitoring recorded a sharp rise in 2024, with religious processions and festivals the largest single trigger and a continuing spread into rural areas.
  • 2025 saw communal riots fall by more than half, with deaths declining too — but lynching incidents did not fall, and the same monitoring argues violence has taken “a different route” into systemic forms: administrative demolition of property after disturbances, restrictions on trade and religious display, and everyday exclusion.
  • The methodological lesson matters more than the numbers. If communalism is an ideology rather than an event, counting riots measures its least representative output, and a falling riot count is consistent with a deepening communalisation.

Conclusion

The evidence points one way: religion in Indian politics is an institutionalised feature, not an aberration, sustained by the structure of electoral competition rather than by the intensity of belief. It was manufactured by the instruments of the modern state, works through machinery that can be described in detail, and recedes only where political actors find it unprofitable.

• Communalism and casteism can be read as symptoms of the plebeianisation of Indian democracy — programmatic contest displaced by mobilised numbers.
  • On the harshest reading they are Indian variants of fascism; that claim needs Jaffrelot’s qualification, that a movement built on cultural rather than racial sameness, with no theory of state and race, is not the European phenomenon renamed.
• No single explanation fits the whole country. In some regions violence is produced by identifiable actors; in others it draws on locally sedimented antagonism — which is why Brass, Varshney and Wilkinson describe the same phenomenon without contradicting one another.
• The Indian secular model is a genuine intellectual achievement and a fragile political one.
  • Principled distance solved what the Western models could not — combating oppression inside religions while preventing domination between them. But the same engagement supplies the charge of partisanship, which is Chandhoke’s point, and why the model is politically weakest where it is philosophically strongest.
• What secularism requires is not the disappearance of religion from public life but its removal from the calculation of political power. On that test the trend is unfavourable, but the standard is right.
• The direction of travel is set by incentives, not sentiment. So long as religious consolidation is the cheapest route to a majority it will be attempted; the counterweights are associational life that crosses the cleavage, an administration willing to act in the first hours, and a party system in which minority votes are pivotal.