intellectual tendencies
have provided respectability to such critiques, for it is often assumed nowadays
that secularism was a creation of the now much-abused Enlightenment rationalism and
scepticism, brought into India in the baggage of colonial discourse, and subsequently
embodied in the repressive nation-states that have emerged on the western pattern.
Actually, even in Europe, the roots of secularism go back at least another 200 years,
to the times of the religious wars ('communal riots', we might legitimately call
them) sparked off by the Reformation. The first advocates of toleration based on
separation of church from state were not rationalist freethinkers, but Anabaptists
passionately devoted to their own brand of Christianity, who still believed that
coercion, persecution and any kind of compulsory state religion was contrary to true
faith.

In India, as in other countries with multiple religious traditions, the neednor can everyday economic struggles afford to skirt questions of
religion, communalism and ideology in the facile hope that material issues and 'real'
class identities will automatically assert themselves.

Thinking back about the Fascist era in Europe may seem a grim and depressing exercise,
now that chauvinist forces are rearing their heads virtually everywhere. But the
memories of the 1930s and early 40s are not just of Storm Troopers, Holocaust, concentration
camps, and the nor unrelated deformations that have culminated today in the shattering
of the world's first socialist experiment. They include the experiences of united,
and in their time victorious, anti-fascist struggle, popular fronts, a Barcelona
very different from the one seen on TV last year, the heroism of Stalingrad and not
just Stalinist terror. The time may have come to draw sustenance once again from
the slogan