The deep-seated anti-Muslim revanchism that one encounters on twitter is usually from young people. This is only possible if communalism had always been the defining ideology in their families and the social networks they inhabit. People didn't become communal overnight (1/n)

What it means is that India's ruling 'secularati' only managed to sweep communalism under the carpet, but it was always present within the family and other institutions outside the domain of the 'state'. (2/n)

It is also clear that the Indian National Congress was overwhelmingly communal at the point of independence. That is why Nehru's candidates failed to win the Congress presidential elections or even become president of India. (3/n)

Nehru and his small team of liberal politicians and apolitical technocrats 'stole India from the Congress'. The reason why Nehru prevailed was because he was clearly the most popular neta in India, which is why he was desperate to hold early general elections. (4/n)

If the naysayers in the Congress had prevailed and universal adult franchise had been delayed, then it is quite possible that a non-Nehru congress government would have been very much like the BJP. This is something secularists - including me - have preferred to ignore. (5/n)

Secularism was effectively the state ideology of Nehruvian 'socialism' (dirigisme). It was spread through state institutions, including schools, colleges, media etc. But, it was never hegemonic, and I would submit it was often identified with 'elite modernity'. (6/n)

Economic reforms, from the mid-80s changed this dominance of the ideology of the 'Lutyens elite'. What replaced it was a newly imagined, revanchist and regressive communal-nationalism, which was always alive in India's trading classes. But that is a separate story (7/7)