Distinguish between religiousness/religiosity and communalism giving one example of how the former has got transformed into the latter in independent India.

Religiousness or religiosity is the depth of personal faith — devotion, ritual observance and ethical striving. Communalism, by contrast, is a political ideology which holds that the followers of a religion share common secular interests — economic and political — that are opposed to those of other communities.

Distinguishing the two

• Orientation: religiosity is inward and spiritual; communalism is outward and political, using faith as a badge of group identity.
• The 'other': religiosity needs no adversary; communalism is constituted by hostility towards another community.
• Compatibility with pluralism: a deeply religious person can be genuinely tolerant — Gandhi is the classic example — while a communalist may be barely religious yet mobilise religion for power.
• Escalation: as Bipan Chandra showed, communalism graduates through stages — from asserting a community's common interests, to claiming they differ from others', to declaring them irreconcilably hostile.
• Consequences diverge: religiosity builds community, ethics and solace; communalism yields riots, ghettoisation and mutual fear.

Transformation of one into the other: the Ayodhya example

• Devotion to Lord Rama is an ancient strand of popular religiosity across India.
• From the 1980s the Ram Janmabhoomi movement converted this devotion into mass political mobilisation around a disputed site, with rath yatras, processions and brick-consecration campaigns hardening competitive identities on both sides and drawing electoral dividends from religious sentiment.
• The demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 and the riots that followed in Mumbai and elsewhere marked the conversion of personal faith into communal conflict, leaving lasting scars on inter-community trust.

The remedy lies not in less religion but in insulating faith from political manipulation: secular statecraft (S.R. Bommai, 1994), impartial policing, value education and inter-faith civic institutions that allow religiosity to flourish without curdling into communalism.