The Lok Sabha is now discussing the saffronization of education, a vital national issue on which SAHMAT - the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust - launched a public debate a week earlier. I was among those invited to speak. I included the throwaway line about how I represented the only party which had never ever come to any political accommodation with what I chose to call 'the forces of communalism', whether at the Centre or in the states. Instead of letting it go at that, the Communist Party of India supremo, comrade A.B. Bardhan, chose to lash back that if the Bharatiya Janata Party was today in power, it was because the Congress had withdrawn support to the Gujral government. To this, the Pondicherry education minister, A.V. Subramanian, riposted that the Congress had only demanded the resignation of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam ministers from the I.K. Gujral government following the Jain commission's indictment of M. Karunanidhi and his cohorts in the events leading to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Had that demand been accepted, the Gujral government would have continued in office. It was the insistence of the United Front, including the communists, on championing the DMK rather than preserving Gujral which had brought down that government. And it is that very DMK which is now the most ardent supporter of the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance at the Centre. So, how did standing up for the DMK amount to standing up against communalism? A more fundamental question was raised by Rajasthan's education minister, C.P. Joshi. Communalism, he said, could not be fought at seminars and conference halls alone. It had to be taken on in the political sphere, and it was in the political arena alone that the future of our secular society could be secured. To that end, the communists had to make up their collective mind: who was the enemy - the BJP or the Congress? It is a question that will not go away. For good or ill, indeed, for ill more than good, our polity has entered an era where in the foreseeable future no one party will be able to muster a majority at the Centre to form a government on its own. Even were this to happen, stable, self-confident governance would require a measure of outside support. The two major parties are the Congress and the BJP. But the two major political formations are the secular and the non-secular forces. If, indeed, the communists believe, as the Congress believes, that the rift valley in Indian politics is the divide between the secularists and the communalists, then the communists, who are without a shadow of doubt the most committed secularists in the country, have to decide whether the nation's political future should be tackled on a party partisan basis or on the basis of ideological conviction. For no single factor has contributed as much to the rise and present eminence of the BJP as the support which the communist parties and their left fronts have extended to political formations which have raised the BJP from the lowly two seats they secured in the 1984 elections to the prime minister's chair, which the BJP has occupied thrice over and uninterruptedly over the last three years. The communists hate to hear this; and the minute one makes the point, they spit forth the counter-argument: what kind of secularists are you who talked of Ram rajya, let the shilanyas go forward, and sat back while the Babri masjid was demolished and the Ram lalla murti installed once again? Guilty on all counts. I am proud of having told a correspondent of this group of newspapers the day after the demolition that the Congress prime minister of the time had shown that death was not a necessary precondition for rigor mortis to set in. The publication of that remark in the Ananda Bazar Patrika perhaps contributed to my never having had a red light mounted atop my motor car. But whatever the Congress's failings in preserving secularism, the irrefutable fact is that it has never ever entered into any kind of understanding, overt or covert with the BJP or any associate of the sangh parivar. A golden opportunity to do so presented itself when Mamata Banerjee proposed the mahajot. I myself wrote in this column at the time that one way of reconciling our secularism with the political imperatives of West Bengal would be to do to the communists in West Bengal what they were doing to us in Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, the CPI and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) are aligned to J. Jayalalitha's All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, as is the Congress, but both communist parties insist that they are not aligned to the Congress. Therefore, I argued, let the Congress and the BJP respectively be aligned to the Trinamool Congress but not to each other. And if the communists complain, we can always say we are only following in West Bengal the precedent the communists themselves have set in Tamil Nadu. It is the only column I have written for which I have been reprimanded by the party high command. How, I was asked, could I claim to be a secular fundamentalist and then devise a political machination to enter into a mutual accommodation with the forces of communalism? That is the point the communists have to ponder over. Without them, many of the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governments of the post-fourth general elections era (1967-71) would not have been formed. The Janata government of 1977, which brought to office at the Centre two notorious Jan Sanghis who are still at large, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, was the toast of the communists. It was the support extended by the communist parties to the covert alliance between V.P. Singh and the BJP in the 1989 elections which raised the BJP's head-count in the Lok Sabha from 2 to 88. Most shamefully, the V.P. Singh government would never have been able to visit on our heads the communal disasters of 1990 if the communists and the communalists had not entered into an unholy alliance to provide the crutches which kept that morally crippled government on its feet. That collaboration in 'outside support' must surely rank as the Indian equivalent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. Moreover, the unholy pact between communism and communalism enabled the BJP to come to power on its own for the first time ever in the state assembly elections of 1990, ushering in a decade of saffron rule in many states. It was the Central government, supported by the communists, which gave Advani the opening and the platform to launch his rath yatra and carry on the unforgivable sin to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, even after Laloo Prasad Yadav picked up Advani and brought the rotten edifice of the V.P. Singh government crumbling down. One Laloo Prasad has done more to keep communalism at bay than the shifting sands of communist politics. If the communists were to reflect on the Laloo example, given that they could not bear to reflect on any Congress example, it might still be possible to rescue Indian secularism in this decade from the horrors of the last.