Religion State and Civil Society

In the recent decades, state and civil society in India has increasingly come under severe attack by the Hindutva forces signifying a vicious political turn. It also signifies that communalism as a socio-political project has come to stay in our society as an ideology and as a political practice explicitly challenging civilisational heritage, polity and India’s composite culture. A serious consequence of the communalisation of society was the undermining of the democratic process and institutions of the modern secular state by the communal forces leading to greater polarisation within civil society as well as social and community consolidation on communal lines. A worrisome social trend, emerging from the various communal conflicts and riots, is the increasing use of violence as an instrument in the polarisation of civil society and polity. Each time a ghastly violence occurs polarisation is further deepened thus fracturing and fragmenting civil society along communal lines, through social and physical ghetoisation.