Communalism

Communalism, in the Indian and South Asian context, denotes an ideology that treats religious community as the fundamental and overriding unit of social, economic and political life, and that holds the interests of one religious community to be irreconcilably opposed to those of another. The term carries a meaning specific to the subcontinent and differs sharply from its older European usage, where "communal" referred neutrally to local self-government. Scholars including Bipan Chandra, in his Communalism in Modern India (1984), located its origins not in ancient religious antagonism but in the political conditions of the late colonial period, when the absence of modern class consciousness and the competition for state employment, professional opportunity and legislative representation pushed elites to organise along religious lines. The institutionalisation of this logic is conventionally traced to the colonial introduction of separate electorates under the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (the Morley–Minto Reforms), which reserved seats and a distinct franchise for Muslims, thereby constitutionalising religious community as a political category.

Bipan Chandra's influential framework describes communalism as developing through three escalating stages. The first, or liberal, stage rests on the belief that adherents of one religion share common secular interests — in politics, economics and culture — by virtue of shared faith. The second stage adds the proposition that the secular interests of different religious communities are mutually distinct and divergent. The third, extreme or fascist, stage asserts that these interests are not merely different but actively hostile and incompatible, so that one community can advance only at the expense of another. This progression matters because it distinguishes ordinary religious identity or piety, which is not communal, from the political weaponisation of that identity. Communalism in this analysis is a modern political phenomenon dressed in the idiom of religion, drawing on selective and often invented readings of history.

The phenomenon operates through several reinforcing mechanisms. Communal polarisation is produced by the propagation of stereotypes, the circulation of rumour, the commemoration of historical grievance, and the construction of a perpetually threatened "us" against a menacing "them". Riots frequently follow a recognisable choreography: a triggering incident, the mobilisation of crowds, the involvement of organised cadres, and the complicity or passivity of segments of the local administration and police. Communalism also expresses itself in non-violent forms — residential ghettoisation, economic boycott, control over educational and cultural institutions, and the capture of public discourse. The role of mass media and, more recently, of social-media platforms in amplifying disinformation has become a central vector, allowing the rapid escalation of localised disputes into mass sentiment.

Indian history furnishes numerous named instances. The Partition violence of 1947 remains the gravest, killing an estimated several hundred thousand people and displacing some fourteen million across the new India–Pakistan boundary. Post-independence episodes include the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in November 1984 following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 and the riots that followed across Mumbai and elsewhere; and the Gujarat violence of February–March 2002. The Sachar Committee, appointed by the Government of India in 2005 and reporting in 2006, documented the socio-economic marginalisation of Muslims, linking communal sentiment to material deprivation. Institutions such as the National Human Rights Commission and judicially appointed commissions of inquiry — including the Srikrishna Commission on the 1992–93 Mumbai riots — have repeatedly examined administrative culpability.

Communalism must be distinguished from several adjacent concepts. It is the antithesis of secularism, which in the Indian constitutional sense (affirmed by the 42nd Amendment of 1976, which inserted "secular" into the Preamble) denotes sarva dharma sambhava — equal respect by the state for all religions — rather than the strict church–state separation of the French laïcité model. It differs from communitarianism, a normative political philosophy valuing community-based identity without positing inter-religious antagonism. It also differs from regionalism and casteism, which mobilise territorial or caste identity, and from fundamentalism, which concerns doctrinal literalism within a faith rather than inter-community political contest. Crucially, religiosity itself is not communalism; a devout believer is not thereby communal.

Contemporary debates contest whether communalism is a colonial construct or has deeper roots, and whether the analytical category adequately captures majoritarian as opposed to minority mobilisation. The rise of organised Hindutva politics, the controversies surrounding the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019, debates over cow-protection vigilantism, "love jihad" legislation in several states, and recurring disputes over places of worship have kept the question politically live. Critics argue the term has at times been deployed selectively; others contend that majoritarian communalism is the more potent contemporary form precisely because it can capture the machinery of the state. The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act of 1991, which froze the religious character of shrines as they stood on 15 August 1947, remains a contested instrument in these struggles.

For the working practitioner — the civil servant, diplomat or policy analyst — communalism is not an abstraction but an operational variable. District administrators manage it through preventive detention, prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the old Code of Criminal Procedure (now reflected in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita), peace committees and intelligence on flashpoints. Diplomats must explain communal incidents to foreign interlocutors and human-rights bodies. For the UPSC aspirant, it is core GS-I content on Indian society, demanding command of its stages, causes, constitutional safeguards and remedies — including education, electoral reform, economic inclusion and the consistent enforcement of the rule of law — that together constitute the secular-democratic response.