COMMUNALISM AND THE STATE: SOME ISSUES IN INDIA 47 cannot be rectified by communal answers because communalism has no proper analysis of the social condition. Therefore, the remedies that they are giving are also wrong. As W. Cantwell Smith once wrote, 'the communalist either deceives others or he deceives himself. Therefore, if you want to fight communalism, especially when it is now reaching the gates of State power—and we will fight it even if it occupies those positions—then ideological struggle in India must become a mass movement, and the intellectuals must fit into this mass movement. Their work must be geared towards this, which first of all, means writing in a language which at least other intellectuals can understand. But in fact what is happening is that while we are reaching at best thousands, the communalists are reaching millions and crores. In other words we also have to build up a mass movement of the order of the shilanyas. We have had several centenaries, those of Acharya Narendra Dev, Acharya Kripalani, Maulana Azad and, above all, of Jawaharlal Nehru, but not a single idea of Jawaharlal Nehru on any aspect was taken to the people. The RSS had Hegdewar centenary. They had at least one meeting in every taluka headquarters, every district headquarters, every state headquarters and then in Delhi, which was deliberately muted so that intellectuals may not get frightened of the RSS strength. In the district headquarters and state headquarters the communal ideology was taken to millions of people. Then they had the shilanya^ and shilapujan with which they went to every mohalla. But what do we do? We take out a march, but do we go to the people, do we go to the mohallas? At present, particularly, when the communalists are getting close to State power, when they have already occupied certain seats of power in the states and are sharing it in other states, when they are getting influential even in the Centre, it is very necessary that ideological struggle is made a mass movement. Unless this is done, we would have lost the battle even before it started.