Characteristic Features of Indian Communalism

Communalism (more accurately ‘sectarianism’) is basically an ideology, which gives more importance to one’s own ethnic/religious group rather than to the wider society as a whole, evolved through three broad stages in India.

(i) Communal Nationalism: the notion that since a group or a section of people belong to a particular religious community, their secular interests are the same, i.e., even those matters which have got nothing to do with religion affect all of them equally.

(ii) Liberal Communalism: the notion that since two religious communities have different religious interests, they have different interests in the secular sphere also (i.e., in economic, political and cultural spheres).

(iii) Extreme Communalism: the notion that not only do different religious communities have different interests, but also that these interests are incompatible, i.e., two communities cannot co-exist because the interests of one community come into conflict with those of the other.

There is nothing unique about Indian communalism. It was the result of the conditions which have, in other societies, produced similar phenomena and ideologies such as Fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland and the Christian-Muslim conflict in Lebanon.

Bypassing basic economic interests, the communalists claim to protect interests which do not necessarily exist. Communalism is a modern phenomenon—rooted in the modern social, economic and political colonial structure— that emerged out of modern politics based on mass mobilisation and popular participation. Modern politics made it necessary for people to have wider links and loyalties and to form establish identities. This process involved the spread of modern ideas of nation, class and cultural-linguistic identity. In India, religious consciousness was transformed into communal consciousness in some parts of the country

and among some sections of the people.

Its social roots lay in the rising middle classes who propagated imaginary communal interests to further their own economic interests—communalism was a bourgeois question par excellence, according to the Left.

Communalists were backed in their communal campaign by the colonial administration. It was the channel through which colonialists expanded their social base.

Communalists and colonialists were helped in their sinister motives by the fact that often socio-economic distinctions in Indian society coincided with religious distinctions. The inherent class contradictions were given a post-facto communal colouring by the vested interests.

Conservative social reactionary elements gave full support to communalism.

Religiosity itself did not amount to communalism but in a country where lack of education and low awareness of the outside world was a sad reality, religion had the potential of becoming, and was used as, a vehicle of communalism.

Reasons for Growth of Communalism Communalism grew in the modern economic, political and social institutions where new identities were emerging in a

haphazard manner even as the old, pre-modern identities had not diminished. A clash of this fundamental dichotomy gave rise to a communal ideology.