50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST construct Indian nationalism on that basis — is certainly not a new one. In fact, this project had begun even earlier than August 15,1947. The communal fire that gripped the civil society months before the declaration of independence, was, in any case a manifestation of such a nationalist project, whose ideological roots can be located in the writings of Golwalkar and the campaigns of Hedgewar on the one hand and adoption of the two nation theory, consequent to the Golwalkar spirit beginning to. guide some of the prominent faces of the Indian National Congress too, by the Muslim League in 1940. It may be true that the Muslim League's Pakistan resolution in 1940 was only in response to the Hinduisation of the Indian National Congress at various levels, particularly its provincial leaders in United Provinces; I am referring to such leaders as Govind Ballabh Pant, Madan Mohan Malaviya in the United Provinces or Gopi Chand Bhargava in the Punjab who were not only accommodated in the Indian National Congress but were able to hold important offices in the organisation despite their record of having participated and even led movements with a definite " anti-Muslim bias. But then, the core of the nationalist movement and by extension the Indian National Congress leadership were committed to the view that the Indian nation must and will have to be builton secular and democratic principles and that there was no place for religious or cultural identities in this project. Thus, therecould be no justification other than a fundamentalist premise to the Muslim League resolution of 1940. And only because the core of the nationalist movement had remained secular, the flames (lit by the communal violence in the wake of partition) were doused within just a couple of years; and far more significantly, independent India matured soon into a Republic whose Constitution was rooted in the pluralist tradition of the freedom movement and democratic principles, emulated essentially from the bourgeois socio-political order that had matured in Western Europe around the same time. This basis is now being challenged. And the challenge is no longer weak. "They" are not just on the fringes of the civil society; not only have "they" entered the mainstream but have grown in size to the extend that they are beginning to hegemonise the political discourse. "They" represent the Golwalkar-Hedgewar tradition, now being identified in the Indian political discourse as Hindutva; the thrust of their ideological position is that Indian nationalism must look back for its roots in the ancient empires that existed such as the Guptas