"The main opposition to the unapologetic communalism of the British and the Muslim League came not from Congress (except initially), but from the Hindu Mahasabha. The Hindutva movement was born in the struggle against communalism; that struggle was its very raison d'être. The HMS's stated programme was to abolish communalism and make India an unalloyed democracy without separate electorates... Very quickly, accurate usage of the term 'communal' was eclipsed by muddled usage.... Today... politicians and journalists and scholars systematically and exclusively apply the term to a movement ... which has always opposed those very policies which were described by their own proponents as 'communal'. And where the term does apply, as in the co-existence of separate religion-based Personal Law systems..., it is studiously avoided."