DASTAK: STARTING POINT FOR FURTHER ACTION 65 media. It follows that secular forces need to not only mobilize to posit a different view of history from the selective inaccurate view of the past told by communalists, but secular groups must also participate in determining the practices of the institutions that disseminate such knowledge. The communalist threat particular to India is not only rooted in the Parivar' s organizational strength but also in the appeal to religion. Speaking in the panel discussion on 'Communalism and History*, professor Sumit Sarkar from Delhi University explained that "For the communal card it has been essential to build up a historical model where throughout history for a thousand years or more Muslims and Hindus have to be assumed to be homogenized blocks engaged in endless conflict with each other.... [This idea] flies in the face of very obvious common-place data." Communalist movements pursue an agenda of restoring the past in order to prove the right of their denomination to power at the exclusion, if not elimination, of all others. By focusing on the ills done to their denomination in the past, they thus gain the right, however illogically, to "sanitization of the present of the sins of the past." Sanitization means the elimination or subordination of the minorities. It is through the demarcation of Hindus from other religious denominations that Hindutva gains support, and in the name of this exclusionary agenda, communalist forces rally their community to aggressively and often violently defend their right to power. Finally, communalist forces increase their community by appealing to nationalism, specifically the nationalism of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Concluding the first panel discussion, Amrita Basu, professor of political science and women' s studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts, described how Hindutva politics takes advantage of the ambivalent identity that many Indians in the United States hold and appeals to their national identity in order to then mobilize them on the basis of religion. Nationalism is often experienced as exile from your homeland. NRI support of communalist forces is in fact a way to feel that nationalism. The VHP has many organizations in place abroad in order to further its support from NRIs. These organizations come under the umbrella of social charitable work. Thus the VHP takes the burden off parents, who are worried about socializing their children to be Indian and not become too Americanized. In this way, the VHP mystifies its connection to politics and goes under the name of social charitable work, linking religion to politics.