Breaking down the question
The command word analyse asks the candidate to break communalism into its components and trace, mechanism by mechanism, how it corrodes democratic functioning. It is not enough to condemn communalism; the answer must show the specific channels through which it damages democracy.
The key conceptual move is to define communalism sociologically — not as religiosity but as the political mobilisation of religious identity, resting on the belief that people of one faith share common secular interests opposed to those of another. Bipan Chandra's account of communalism as an ideology is the standard reference.
The note on problems of religious minorities provides the empirical backdrop for the democratic costs discussed here.
How to approach it
Define communalism carefully and distinguish it from religion, then set out the democratic ideals it threatens — equal citizenship, rational deliberation, minority rights and the rule of law. Analyse the mechanisms in turn: the substitution of identity for issues in electoral politics, majoritarianism and the erosion of minority security, communal violence and the breakdown of the rule of law, and the narrowing of the public sphere.
Maintain analytical balance by acknowledging both majority and minority communalism and their symbiotic relationship. Conclude by affirming secularism and substantive citizenship as the democratic antidote.
Model answer
Communalism must first be distinguished from religion. Following Bipan Chandra, communalism is an ideology holding that adherents of a religion share common secular — social, political and economic — interests that are opposed to those of adherents of another religion. It is the political mobilisation of religious identity, and it is in this political form that it undermines democracy.
Identity displaces issues in electoral politics. Democracy rests on citizens choosing between programmes on rational grounds. Communalism substitutes religious identity for policy, encouraging vote-bank mobilisation in which parties appeal to communal blocs rather than to the common good. Deliberation gives way to polarisation, and the electorate is fragmented along lines of faith.
Majoritarianism and the erosion of equal citizenship. Democracy guarantees equal rights irrespective of religion. Majoritarian communalism recasts the nation as the property of the numerical majority and treats minorities as second-class or suspect citizens. T. K. Oommen's distinction between nation and state is useful here: communalism confuses cultural majority with political sovereignty, hollowing out the promise of equal citizenship.
Violence and the breakdown of the rule of law. Communal riots represent the most direct assault on democracy. They destroy life and property, criminalise entire communities, and expose the partisanship of sections of the state machinery. Where the police and administration act along communal lines, the rule of law — democracy's basic guarantee — collapses. Asghar Ali Engineer's studies of riots showed how they are frequently engineered for political and economic ends rather than erupting spontaneously.
Narrowing of the public sphere. A healthy democracy needs a public sphere of reasoned debate across differences. Communalism poisons this sphere with mutual suspicion, silences dissent within each community, and empowers hardliners who claim to speak for a homogenised faith. Minority and majority communalism feed on each other in a spiral that leaves little room for the secular citizen.
The democratic answer is not the suppression of religion but secularism — the state's principled distance from all faiths — and a substantive citizenship in which rights attach to individuals rather than communities. Communalism undermines democracy precisely because it dissolves the individual citizen into a religious bloc; its remedy is to restore the citizen.
Examiner's perspective
Weak answers conflate communalism with religion or with communal violence alone, and lapse into moral denunciation without analysis. The examiner rewards the conceptual distinction between religion and communalism and a systematic account of the mechanisms — electoral, majoritarian, legal and deliberative — through which democracy is eroded.
High marks go to balanced treatments that recognise both majority and minority communalism and their reciprocal dynamic, and that close with secularism and equal citizenship as the democratic corrective. References to Chandra, Oommen or Engineer demonstrate familiarity with the Indian sociology of communalism and lift the answer within the fifteen-mark frame.