40 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the Social Scientist, who were arguing that the Congress is a communal party and Indira Gandhi is a communal leader because she had got subterranean support in Delhi or Jammu elections from the RSS. Surprisingly, when the RSS openly Supports another secular party, the Janata Dal, in the elections, the same people do not brand the Janata Dal as a communal party. In fact, I think it would be as wrong to brand the Janata Dal as a communal party as to brand the Congress as a communal party earlier or now. I think once we see that communalism is an ideology, then our definition of what is a communal party gets better grounded. Communal parties and groups are those which are structured around the communal ideology. Take away communal ideology or make them abandon communal ideology, and nothing is left of them. The group or the party disintegrates. It is this which was seen by the Muslim League leadership and Jinnah Sahib in 1937 when they were forced to put another chip of communal ideology, religion, militancy and extremism into their programme and propaganda or face disintegration of the Muslim League and Muslim communalism. The same dilemma was faced by the Akali leadership in 1981, once they lost the elections in Punjab. In this respect, we should not forget that it was the so-called moderate leadership which gave the slogan that there is a genocide against the Sikhs and that the Sikh religion in Punjab is in danger. It was not Bhindranwala who gave this slogan in 1981 and 1982. I hear and read lot of talk about reforming the BJP, of asking the RSS to give up its anti-Muslim stance; some say that the BJP minus communalism is okay. My view would be that the BJP minus communalism is not okay. The BJP minus communalism is zero and the BJP leaders know this very well. Even the effort to disguise their communal ideology behind 'Gandhian socialism* and Din Dayal Upadhayayism was seen by the leaders to have resulted in the disaster of 1984 in electoral terms. In other words, the raison d'etre of a communal party is communalism. And here I might make an additional point. If a communal party uses communalism to capture power, but knowing that it cannot build society on that basis it wants to give up communalism, it will not be able to do so. The belief that it can is a chimera, because, as I said, when the communal ideology prevails for a long enough time, and especially if it enables its leadership to come to power, it acquires a life of its own. If the leadership which has used communal ideology to capture power, by some miracle, then wants to give it up, it cannot. We have a very good example of this in Mohammed Ali Jinnah who used the most vicious form of communal ideology from 1938 to 1947, but on 13th August, 1947, declared, and very genuinely so, that Pakistan would be now a secular State, where politics will not be determined by religion, where every citizen following any religion will be equal and, religion will have no relevance to his status as a citizen. But even Jinnah was not able to stem the tide of the ideology that he had