"He was successful in articulating a usable political history, and then openly practicing history as ideology by other means. His assumptions are now so widespread that we forget what an achievement it was to make them hegemonic. One assumption, clearly articulated in Communalism in Modern India, was that while communal consciousness could exist in pre-Modern India, communalism could not. This is not the place to go into the veracity of this claim. But what is striking is that this conclusion is arrived at almost a priori. History is an elaboration of this claim, not evidence for it... The strange Congress-Left elective affinity was forged less by a fear of the RSS than by the fact that the Congress, during the ’70s, gave up its own complex historical sensibility and substituted it with the Left. Chandra was the key protagonist in that significant historical transformation and therefore dominated like few historians have."