ABSTRACT
The emergence of the region as the highest rung in the British colonialsystem where Indians could expect to exercise power in the foreseeablefuture had a decisive bearing on the continuing interplay of discourse and politics. While much of the discourse drew on communitarian conceptions of identity and sovereignty, the liberal democratic idea of separating the religious and the temporal domains was coming to be projected by the Congress as the basis of equal citizenship rights in an independent India. Reactions to the Sarda Act of 1929 underlined the unwillingness of many Muslims and Hindus to countenance interference in their religiously informed cultural practices. On the face of it, Congress’s inclusionary nationalism left religion out of the affairs of the state. Mere declarations of religious impartiality did little to assuage fears roused by the evocation of majoritarianism in the more potent concoctions of communitarian bigotry. It was the exclusion by obfuscation implicit in the more moderate blendings of community and nation which did most to steel Muslim resistance to Congress’s inclusionary nationalism.
