. • • UNITY IN DIVERSITY 43 good economic standing will necessarily be 'progressive' or amenable to change. The thin spread of education and the feeling of economic and, sometimes, physical insecurity—whether or not justified—that the Muslim feels makes him more tied to his community and less open to change. There is another reason for the continuing lack of convergence between the perspectives of the Hindus and the Muslims/Their community goals and aspirations are governed by differing points of reference in the history of India. The Hindu tends to glorify in retrospect the Vedie Aryan age or the Gupta period of Indian history, the Muslim is brought up to look to the medieval period of Muslim dominance as the golden age. In some cases in Rajasthan and Maharashtra they may look to the heroic past of Rana Pratap or the intrepid resistance to Aurangzeb presented by Chhatrapati Shivaji. The historical context in which these heroes functioned was very different and the methods they adopted to cope with the problems of gaining access to political power in the middle ages do not have the same applicability in an age when we speak of individual freedom, civic equality, basic human rights, democratic processes and representative government. What is more serious is that these divergent reference points in the past and the corresponding self images they help to nurture in the present have the unfortunate consequence of engulfing the cultural descendents of these^ heroes in an unending imagery of mutual confrontation and enmity. The tendency to. teach history as a series of heroic tales without a proper interpretation of the social context and the values of the times which would make them understandable in the present is the source of much mischief. For a time the Muslim progressives, like many others, seemed to count on the success of the political left as a solvent for our internal dissensions whether due to religion or economic inequities. But the failure of the Communist state in the Soviet Union and the rise of religious fundamentalism in Iran and then in the Arab world and now in Central Asia have-at least temporarily weakened their hands. Our real hope for achievmg^a peaceable society lies in our ability to give meaning and substance to the promise of a socially just, democratic and secular order in our nation state. This calls for much constructive thought, political skill and sustained social action on the part of all who cherish this goal.