SOCIAL SCIENTIST opposition. (No amount of publicised fasting on 30 January now can wash away the sins of those who shared and continue to share the ideas of Gandhi's assassin). It is a matter of immense danger to the entire legacy of the National Movement and to India's entity as a nation that those who jubilated over Gandhiji's murder, are in power today. Many factors may be invoked to explain how this has come to pass: the failure of the Congress, over the long period it governed, to fulfil its economic and social pledges; the setbacks to socialism received in recent years; the failure of the secular parties to unite; and, not the least, the shift of Big Business patronage to BJP, as a party far more pliant to its interests (as the RSS Swadeshi expert, Mr Guruswamy has just learnt to his edification!). The costs to the nation of this development are already enormous. If the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 was not enough to humiliate and defame the nation throughout the world, the orchestrated barbarous attacks on Christians are adding a new dimension to the undermining of our secularism. The Pokharan tests and the bellicose official statements that followed them, have heavily damaged India's long-term interests in the world arena, all for gaining a momentary applause within the country. While public attention is often riveted to the successive parliamentary crises and public scandals, the^ new rulers' insidious work of dismantling the secular structure, using TV and press for communal propaganda, promoting communal and chauvinistic myths in the name of history, and changing syllabi and text books to accord with the new official doctrine, goes on unabated. The long-term threat to the very secular and democratic nature of the Indian nation is, therefore, extremely grave; and, if this process of saffronization is allowed to continue, the consequential weaking of the nation's unity and integrity could bring about a disaster. It must be realized that our nation has been created by the Indian people after centuries of endeavour. First, as we have seen, they began to have a vague conception of India as a country some two thousand and five hundred years ago. Thereafter, in stages, as their knowledge about themselves and others grew, they began to identify the cultural features that were common to them, and to recognize a unity in the diversity of their religions and languages. But it was their resistance to colonialism and absorption of modern democratic (and later socialist) ideas that began to transform India from a country — a geographical and cultural entity - into a true nation. India is, then, a creation of the Indian people, a product not simply of nature or even