 Hello everyone, my name is Deeksha Jain and I secured the 22nd Rankin Civil Services Examination 2018. In this video, I will be talking about the topic communalism. So what is communalism? Communalism is a feeling of disaffection between two communities or people belonging to different religions and it manifests itself in various forms in terms of social distance, violence, communal riots, even lynchings etc. So we will go to communalism from the perspective of Bipin Chandra's theory of communalism which has given three stages of communalism. The first stage is liberal communalism. In liberal communalism, people of one religious group because their religious interests are similar, their secular interests will also be similar. So the first stage is liberal communalism and liberal communalism means that people belonging to the same religious group believe that just because their religious interests are similar that secular interests will also be similar. So if their religion are similar, other concerns like their concerns for health, jobs, employment etc. will also be similar. The second stage of communalism is moderate communalism and in this not only do people believe that they have common secular interests but they believe that their secular interests is different from the secular interests of other religions. For example, people from religion A might believe that their concern for jobs is separate from that concern for jobs of the people of religion B. So although that concern might not be different but people believe that because the religious interests are similar, secular interests are similar and they are different from the interests of the other religious communities. The third state which is the militant communalism which basically manifests itself in violence is basically when people start believing that not only are their secular interests different but that their secular interests are absolutely divergent and divergent from the secular interests of the other religion and that both cannot exist together. This manifests itself into hatred for another community and also to communal riots. So according to this theory, communalism is not something which is there by default but it is also manufactured by a you know force sense of identity and unlike regionalism where mild regionalism may lead to empowerment, communalism is generally it leads to disaffection in the society, law and order problems, lot of mistrust in the society, it affects the economy in a bad way often leads to lot of violence and India has had some history of communal violence in the country. So what are the causes of development of communalism in India? The first one is historical cause, communalism has been seen as something which was given to India by the British through the divide and rule policy. So the British would often play the Muslim community against the Hindus and the Hindus against the Muslims repeatedly telling them that giving certain favours only to Hindus or only to Muslims so that it disaffected the other community. The partition of Bengal was a major point in this history where because of division of Bengal on religious lines ultimately you know over the years then India was finally partitioned on the basis of religion and number two in the historical factor is also misinterpretation of facts and figures, figures even during a nationalist struggle. So there was a lot of harkening back to ancient India for example without talking about the medieval period when India had Islamic rulers or rise of certain organisations like Hindu Mahasabha etc or even the All India Muslim League. So all these organisations they tried to promote their religious interest instead of the focusing on the national movement and this also led to fostering of communalism and of course the biggest consequence of that was partition and the creation of Pakistan on the basis of Islam and communalism continues in India also because of these reasons. There are also economic factors when people start believing when there is relative deprivation one is that there may be a government policies which discriminate against the people in a very systematic manner so that anger and frustration leads to communalism. There are countries where people of other religion do not have the same rights as the people of the religion of the state for example. So there communalism can take this form where the state does not create there is also a relative deprivation theory that when people start believing that deprivation their problems are because all the benefits are being given to the other religion and that leads to a lot of communal disharmony and we also have an equal opportunity commission on the recommendation of Sacher commission to overcome these barriers so that opportunities the equal opportunities realised in this kind of communalism does not rare its head. Political factors in terms of nexus between religion and politics use of religion in promoting the political interest vote-bank politics etc. has also led to the rise of communalism. There are also psychological factors in terms of trust deficit between the two communities dialogue vacuum if two communities do not talk to each other to religious communities then there is a certain distance which over the years as with through Chandra's theory we realise develops into communalism and the third is fear psychosis when people become scared and whether maybe an imaginary of a real fear that they will be targeted because of their religion or they are being discriminated against because of their religion. So these psychological factors also have a big role to play in fostering communalism and of course there are local and regional factors so apart from these larger religious ideas there may be local issues in a particular area which may further increase the enmity between two religious communities. So now we will move on to the measures that can be taken or that have been taken also to combat communalism. So basically the first one is the awareness building about secularism and dec communalisation of all sections of the society and by dec communalisation what we mean is that building awareness that the presence of a certain community is not harmful to the presence of another community. So these secular ethos constitutional values need to be propagated. Other measures apart from these are a promotion of modern secular and liberal education developing code of conduct and ethics especially for politicians and during the time of elections making sure that it is implemented properly so that religious rhetoric is not used to create factions in the society controlling the activities of communal organisations promoting ideals and values of the constitutions which guarantees the right to freedom, right to equality to every citizen of India. Promotion of rule of law, maintenance of peace and peace maintenance committees can also be created at local levels which can if there is any issue between two communities then these committees can be used to solve them as opposed to you know it can be used to increase the communication between the two communities and reduce the distance between them. Then promoting values and ideals of democracy and diversity, so server dharm sambhav is something that needs to be propagated. Economic development with special care to people of the communities which are marginalised because then they do not feel left out of the development process and their communalism does not develop as an ideology and last 3D disposal of communal matters and codes so that the sense of justice and belief in the constitution of India stays with the people. So that will be all for communalism, thank you so much.