The Supreme Court’s positive response to the PIL asking for action against the organisers of the notorious ‘Dharm Sansad’ at Haridwar last month, where calls for genocide of Muslims were given openly, has rekindled hope in the secular destiny of India, which was an article of faith with Jawaharlal Nehru and all his partners in the freedom movement. We bring to you this week the third and final part of a seminal essay by him which explains how communalism is pro-imperialist, reactionary, offers nothing to the masses, and how it functions at the behest of the upper class.The point is that a special responsibility does attach to the Hindus in India both because they are the majority community and because economically and educationally they are more advanced. The [Hindu] Mahasabha, instead of discharging that responsibility has acted in a manner which has undoubtedly increased the communalism of the Muslims and made them distrust the Hindus all the more. The only way it has tried to meet their communalism is by its own variety of communalism. One communalism does not end the other; each feeds on the other and both fatten. The Mahasabha at Ajmer has passed a long resolution on the Communal Award pointing out its obvious faults and inconsistencies. But it has not, so far as I am aware, said a word in criticism of the White Paper scheme…. But from the Mahasabha’s point of view to ignore it was to demonstrate that it cared little, if at all, about the political aspect of Indian freedom. It thought only in terms of what the Hindus got or did not get. It has been reported that a resolution on independence was brought forward but this was apparently suppressed. Not only that, no resolution on the political or economic objective was considered. If the Mahasabha claims to represent the Hindus of India, must it be said that the Hindus are not interested in the freedom of India? Ordinarily this would be remarkable enough. But in present-day conditions and with the background of the past few years of heroic struggle and sacrifice, such a lapse can have only one meaning— that the Mahasabha has ceased to think even in terms of nationalism and is engrossed in communal squabbles. Or it may be that the policy is a deliberate one so as to avoid irritating the government with which the Mahasabha wishes to cooperate.
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