50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The other form of anti-Mandal agitation, though not directly linked, was the Rath yatra of Advani which succeeded in putting the Mandir question in the centre stage of Indian politics. Its central theme was the question of Indian nation and how 'pseudo-secularism* has corrupted our nationalism and eaten into the vitals of the Indian nation. It is pseudo because of the appeasement of the minorities and especially so as it is based on the systematic pampering of the Muslims. Dominant political thought and mainstream politics, both leftist and centrist, is culpable in this crime against the nation. In passing it is not unimportant to note that, unlike the earlier versions of the nineteenth century Hindu thought, the idiom and conceptual baggage of Advani and his lot is not very different from those who are battling him; on the face of it, this idiom is quite modern except that it gets prefixed or suffixed by easily intelligible words, words that drastically alter the normal sense of the terms. A debased language has of late come up and become the standard currency of political communications. Both upper class vandalism and communal aggressiveness picked on to one theme which became central to the kind of debate that had filled the public sphere and this had to do with the illegitimacy of the pampering of the undeserving. These are the castes with ample land and cows and political clout and there is a community with four wives and all the means to support them and suspect foreign connections. Many a laws of the land are made only to favour these castes and the community. And, on top of that, by acting as vote banks they exercise undue power. It is therefore not surprising that with a little shuffling in the packs, these two trends—the anti-Mandal forces and the currents represented in the Rath yatra—have by now coalesced into one, the bloc representing communalism of the militant Hindu right-wing. With ascendance of Hindutva, communalism which earlier was an aspect of Indian politics has now become the politics of the country. Communalism now is therefore no more a question of tactics about how to contain it but has become one of strategic thinking and protracted struggles. One major result of the rise to prominence of this kind of politics has been that deception has become constitutive of the culture and 'discourse* that informs the politics of the country today. Sections of ruling classes and other privileged strata have allowed political life to be densely surrounded by lies and distortions. The one major repercussion of this has been the damaging impact on the common vocabulary of politics and collective social activity within which solidarities are forged and majorities made and unmade. I will come to this point again but it is worth mentioning here how common terms in political use like democracy, secular, nation and so on or even^erms like entitlement have been emptied of their meaning and filled with a