Communalism is an ideology which holds that a religious community is also a political community — that all its members share a single set of social, economic and political interests by virtue of their faith, that these interests differ from those of other religious communities, and, in its developed form, that they are mutually antagonistic. It is not the existence of religious communities that constitutes communalism but this political reading of them: a claim about who belongs together and against whom.
Two consequences follow from the definition. First, communalism requires the homogenisation of a community — the erasure of its internal divisions of caste, class, region, language, sect and gender — because a bloc can only be mobilised if it is imagined as undivided. Second, it requires the construction of the other as a permanent adversary. Bipan Chandra therefore called communalism a form of false consciousness: it substitutes a religious explanation for problems whose real causes lie in class relations, uneven development and the competition for power and jobs.
What communalism is not
Careful distinctions carry most of the marks here. Communalism is not religiosity: a person may be intensely devout without holding that co-religionists form a political bloc, and communal leaders are often indifferent to doctrine. It is not communal harmony, which presupposes plural communities living by mutual accommodation — communalism denies that accommodation is possible. It is not secularism, whose claim is the separation of religious identity from citizenship and state action, and which Rajeev Bhargava reformulates for India as principled distance rather than strict separation. Nor is it a synonym for a riot: the riot is an episodic outcome, communalism the enduring ideology and organisation that makes riots possible.
Stages of communal ideology
Chandra's most examinable contribution is a stage model. In the first stage the belief is that people of the same religion share common secular interests; this is communal but not yet hostile. In the second stage the belief hardens into the view that the interests of different religious communities are dissimilar and divergent. In the third stage those interests are held to be irreconcilably antagonistic, so that one community can advance only at another's cost. He mapped the first two stages onto liberal communalism, which operates within constitutional politics and bargains over seats, jobs and quotas, and the third onto extreme communalism, which he saw as tending towards a fascist politics of hatred, mass mobilisation and violence.
Colonial roots and the modern making of community
Sociologists agree that communalism is modern, not a survival of medieval enmity. Colonial historiography, following James Mill, periodised Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British epochs, teaching Indians to read the past as religious conflict. The census from the 1870s counted and tabulated religious communities, turning fluid identities into enumerable majorities and minorities with measurable shares of population, education and employment. Separate electorates for Muslims from 1909, extended in 1919 and widened by the Communal Award of 1932, then made religion the legal basis of representation, so that political competition was institutionally organised as inter-religious competition. Gyanendra Pandey's The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) shows how administrative accounts of local disputes retrospectively coded them as timeless religious conflict. Alongside this ran the deliberate divide and rule of colonial administration.
Majoritarian and minority communalism
Communalism has no single religious address. Majoritarian communalism claims to speak for the numerical majority, identifies the nation with its culture, treats minorities as suspect or as recipients of appeasement, and can use the language of democracy — the majority's will — to legitimate itself; its danger lies in its capacity to capture the state. Minority communalism is typically defensive, built on real and perceived insecurity, and tends to strengthen conservative leaderships within the minority who claim exclusive representation and resist internal reform, often at the cost of women's rights. The two are reciprocal: each cites the other as proof of its own necessity, producing what analysts describe as a spiral of mobilisation and counter-mobilisation.
Drivers and consequences
The material drivers identified in Indian sociology include competition among educated middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie for scarce jobs, credit and urban property; uneven regional development; and the electoral utility of religious polarisation. Paul Brass argues that riots are not spontaneous but produced by institutionalised riot systems of specialists, rumour and political patronage, while Ashutosh Varshney's comparison of Indian cities finds that dense inter-communal civic associations — unions, business bodies, clubs — best predict which places stay peaceful. Asghar Ali Engineer's studies of post-independence riots point to their urban concentration and economic undertow.
The consequences fall on the secular state. Communalism converts citizens into members of blocs, weakens the impartiality of police and administration, legitimises residential segregation, drives minority under-representation and deprivation of the kind documented by the Sachar Committee Report of 2006, and diverts attention from class and developmental questions. Its deepest cost is to substantive citizenship: rights that depend on which community one belongs to are no longer rights.
For the UPSC answer
Define communalism as an ideology, not an emotion or an event, and make the three distinctions immediately — from religiosity, from communal harmony, and from secularism. Chandra's three stages plus the liberal-versus-extreme division give the answer its spine; anchor the modernity claim in the census, separate electorates from 1909 and colonial periodisation, and cite Pandey. Always treat majoritarian and minority communalism as reciprocal rather than equivalent in consequence, and add Brass on produced violence and Varshney on civic engagement for analytical depth. Conclude on the damage to secular citizenship rather than on moral condemnation.
References & further reading
- Chandra, B. (1984). Communalism in Modern India. Vikas Publishing House.
- Pandey, G. (1990). The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Oxford University Press.
- Engineer, A. A. (ed.) (1984). Communal Riots in Post-Independence India. Sangam Books.
- Brass, P. R. (2003). The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. University of Washington Press.
- Varshney, A. (2002). Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. Yale University Press.
- Bhargava, R. (ed.) (1998). Secularism and Its Critics. Oxford University Press.