10 SOCIAL SCIENTIST vital role. But a nation can, then, be also eroded and destroyed the same way it has evolved or been built. In modern times, just as national consciousness has grown, the same factors for its growth such as the press and communications, have also intensified feelings of religious identities over ever larger spaces. Communalism in India inevitably developed alongside nationalism. In Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi had warned that the "nation" could have no association with any religion, and people of different communities in India must live "in unity". It was for this that he struggled without any respite and finally laid down his life: Secularism has been at the heart of our nationhood. As Jawaharlal Nehru noted, once the majority religious community insisted on associating its religion with the nation, its communalism could masquerade itself as nationalism, whereas the minority's communalism could always be identified for what it was. It happened that the Two-Nation theory developed on both sides: The "Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan" slogan of the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS was asv subversive of national unity as that of "Pakistan" adopted by the Muslim League after the Lahore Resolution of 1940. Over fifty years ago the Indian people took a historic decision of rejecting a religious colour for their nation amidst the provocation of partition, the communal massacres, and the martyrdom of Gandhiji. Today, it seems that the decision is to be subjected to review by a constitutional commission or under some other colour. This is all the more reason, I submit, for centres of education and enlightenment, and all thinking people in general, to take up the cause of the nation's true interests, and speak up for its true historic legacy.