Attachment to a religious community or religiosity is not communalism. Using a religious community against other communities and against the nation-state is communalism. Communalism seeks to appropriate rather arbitrarily religious tenets, traditions and values to suit the exigencies of current political life and tactical interests. Communalism is perversion of religion from a moral order to a temporal arrangement of' contemporary convenience, from a faith into a means to build a political constituency. In the communalist mind, the religious community alone is seen as the base of political ambition and action aimed at seizing the power of the modern state.
Religious community is the only relevant and valid category in politics and in state affairs.
As such the phenomenon is not a conservative reaction akin to the medieval past, but a mod ernized form of reaction. As a political strategy, then, communalism is opposed to nationalism as an aggregation of multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual communities. It opposes the secular basis of legitimacy of the state - political integration based on common citizenship rules. In fact, communalists see other religious communities as inimical entities within a polity and within a nation, arranged in an unfriendly antagonistic and belligerent equation, one against the another. The Indian state today has come under siege by the open and provocative defiance of an agglomeration of the major opposition groups to the ruling Congress Party, known collectively as Sangh Parivar.