In a Secular Agenda, Arun Shourie sums up the essence of Indian secularism in just a line: Indian secularism consists of branding others communal. In a typical Nehruvian secularist state, the term “communal” and its other variations are almost exclusively-designated swearwords reserved for use against anybody remotely espousing even genuine Hindu causes.

Here’s what I found, briefly, after investigating its origins.

My trusted online dictionary, Wordweb defines communal as an Adjective that means:

For or by a group rather than individuals; Relating to a small administrative district or community

While the Oxford lexicon defines Communal as:

of or for the or a community, for the common use

And defines Communalism as the

principle of communal organization of society

And carries an entry for the Paris Commune, which it calls a

communalistic government in Paris in 1871.

Semantics do matter tremendously and changes in meaning often take centuries to occur. The Western world, which carries diametrically different notions about Communal can, by no stretch of imagination hope to attribute pejorative connotations to it. Little surprise that our secular journalists have historically failed to make their firangi counterparts understand that communal is a swearword in the Indian context. Nor does the current crop of journalists have the required erudition, nay, inclincation to trace the roots of this phenomenon. This mostly explains why it is easy for Hindu-baiting papers like the NYT and others to substitute “communal” with fundamentalist, militant, and fascist.

The roots of Indian Communalism lie in the British colonial policy of giving community-based representation in recruitment and allotment of seats in representative assemblies. In itself the term had no pejorative meaning, and was well-defined.

Indian nationalists however, objected to this policy because it took the religious community as the operative unit rather than the individual or the region or the nation. The Lucknow Pact of 1916 saw the Indian National Congress succummb to accepting communal electorates. The driving force behind this capitulation was the Congress party’s illusion that it would convince the Muslim League to join the freedom struggle. Subsequent events demonstrated the opposite culminating in the creation of Pakistan.

An crucial fact about the genesis of Communalism is concealed in a forgotten document called the Pirpur Report. This report published in 1938 lists Muslim grievances as being blamed by Congress ministers for starting riots, being insulted by the singing of the idolatrous anthem Vande Mataram, not recognizing Urdu as a national link-language, Gandhi’s talk against cow slaughter, etc. And the most important portion of this report: The Indian National Congress’ concept of nationalism is based on the establishment of a national state of the majority…in which other nationalities and communities have only secondary rights. The Muslims think that no tyranny is as great as the tyranny of the majority.

This is precisely one of the defining premises of our secularists. In its time, the Muslim League was communalism-incarnate, demanding separate electorate, communal representation, communal job quotas, communal-everything. This, at a time when the Congress was bending backwards to concede every demand in the hope of drawing the Muslim League into the freedom struggle.

The main opposition to Communalism came from the Hindu Mahasabha, and not the Congress party. The present-day Hindutva movement is the product of a struggle against Communalism. The Hindu Mahasabha’s most vocal manifesto was to abolish Communalism and make India a democracy without separate electorates or communal quotas.

The Congress party defended its compromise with Communalism by assuming a symmetery between the Muslim League and the Mahasabha. It cannot be emphasized enough that while the Muslim League demanded–and got–separateness, the Hindu Mahasabha fought against this very separateness-struggle.

Thus began the perversion of the term.

Note: I won’t have PC access for at least a week. I’ll respond to all comments/criticism once I’m back.

Cross-posted to Desicritics and INI Signal.