SPECIAL ARTICLE july 11, 2015 vol l no 28 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 48 This is a revised/updated version of an article in a forthcoming book Communalism in Postcolonial India: Changing Contours (Routledge) edited by Mujibur Rehman. I am thankful to James Chiriyankandath, Meena Dhanda, Rohini Hensman, Bhabani Nayak, Manisha Sethi and especially Tanya Singh for comments on earlier drafts of this article. The usual disclaimer applies. Pritam Singh (psingh@brookes.ac.uk) teaches Economics at the Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, Faculty of Business, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, the UK. Institutional Communalism in India Pritam Singh The fight against institutional communalism in India alerts us to a challenge bigger than merely inflicting electoral defeats on Hindu communal parties and organisations. Even if such parties are defeated electorally, institutional Hindu communalism remains pervasive in varying degrees in India’s Constitution, judiciary, civil services, electoral and parliamentary institutions, security forces, prisons, academia, media, corporate business, and even non-governmental organisations, it will continue as a social, cultural and politico-economic force to disadvantage the lives of minority communities in India. T his paper has three main objectives. The first objective is to draw attention to the anomalous and negative con- notations of the word communal as it is used in the pro- gressive (academic and activist) discourse around communal- ism and secularism in India. The second objective is to intro- duce a new concept “institutional communalism” as a theoreti- cal tool to map the true scale of religious sectarianism/ communalism in the subcontinent, and to argue that the fight against institutional communalism involves not only an ideological/pedagogical struggle, but also practical measures to record, monitor and eradicate it. The third objective is to challenge the pervasive practice of equating “majority com- munalism” with “minority communalism.” Progressive discourse around the critique of communalism in India has focused primarily on instances of inter-religious violence and the activities of political and social organisations that are characterised as communal—that is to say “engaged in articulating the demands or viewpoints of one or other religious community.” The fundamental weakness of this dis- course is that it neglects the deeper and less visible political, socio-economic and cultural structures that give birth to sec- tarianism/communalism and to sectarian/communal organi- sations. Furthermore, such a discourse has an inbuilt bias in that it equates, what are normally referred to in the literature as, majority and minority communalisms. This paper is an attempt to develop a critique of this discourse by delving deeper into the institutional structures of communalism in India. I have chosen to name this deeper structure of commu- nalism as institutional communalism, drawing on the experi- ences of anti-racist activism and theories of institutional racism in the United Kingdom ( UK). Communalism vs Religious Sectarianism It is a strange linguistic anomaly that in the discourse on sec- tarianism/communalism in India, the word communal has generally come to acquire a pejorative connotation, suggesting divisiveness and conflict. In the rest of the world, especially beyond South Asia, this word tends to relate to social unity and cohesion, and to socially progressive and collective modes of thinking and activities: communal agriculture, communal ownership of land, communal irrigation, communal kitchen, communal leisure, communal singing and communal dancing, etc. 1 In all these examples, the word communal suggests public sharing in contrast with private and individualistic pursuits, a positive connotation that implies cooperation and mutual tolerance. In India, however, the word communal has come to acquire an inverted and largely negative sense, that of socially divisive