8 - Conclusion

Summary

This book has set out to investigate how an organisation that aimed to adopt secularism came to be permeated with languages of Hindu nationalism. This question has been approached by asking a secondary question: how can we explain the division of political life along the lines of religious community in the crucial province of UP, and what part did this process play in the eventual division of the subcontinent? Both questions have been examined from the point of view of institutional connections between the Congress at different levels and parties of Hindu communal organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj. The links of Congressmen to institutional Hindu nationalism – the Hindu Sabhas, the Arya Samaj and the RSS – were complex and regionally diverse. But does the evidence of those linkages provide a sufficient explanation for Muslim alienation from the Congress and the persistent use of a Hindu idiom within mainstream nationalism? After all, the institutions of Hindu communal organisation were in themselves relatively powerless both in elections and in the crucial multiparty negotiations of the 1930s and 1940s. Might there not be another level, at which the ideological importance of these institutions did have an impact not only on Congress as an institution, but also on the nature of ideology and political language with which UP Congressmen engaged?