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Disclaimer: I do not claim to have any clue about India. I am answering this question because the question says "what do these lines mean", rather than "are these lines an accurate portrayal of what actually happened?".
The lines you are quoting are assuming that Hindus and Muslims are not "natural" enemies. History has examples of how groups that are enemies today might get along better tomorrow, and vice versa. You might take e.g. Protestants and Catholics in most of Europe in the 17th century vs today as an example for the first, and e.g. Poles and Jews in the 16th century vs. the 19th century as an example for the second (though I am just guessing a bit re. Poles and Jews).
Furthermore, the whole concept of Hindus and Muslims as a coherent group, as natural as it may seem, is not a given. Chinese would never sort themselves along lines such as Daoists vs. Buddhists*. The idea of an exclusively Catholic political party would be ridiculous in today's Germany, yet one such party played an important role in pre-Nazi Germany.
What is more, the emergence of such groups can be influenced by outside events. E.g. in the early 1920s, Austrians thought of themselves as part of a German nation and there actually was a strong movement to form a single state. Today this view is an absolute fringe position. There was not much of a shared identity between what later become East Germany in the 1930s, but today there is.
What these lines are saying is that
Quite often there is not the one single reason for a violent conflict. This applies to economic or social (a.k.a. "class") differences, religious differences, and a number of other differences you might think of. On the other hand there are conflicts were religion clearly plays a major role (say, the Khajirite uprising in the 7th century). In any case it is usually a good idea to not accept some simple explanation at face value, be it religion, or nationality, class, or machinations of some political elite.
Finally, I think an early example of the view that religious differences might not really matter that much, even if they have grave and important consequences today, is Jonathan's Swift's text about eggs and endianness from 1726.
Since other users seem to care a lot about Marxism, it may be worth pointing out that one good example of "the creation or development of communal consciousness [as] an instrument of struggle" might be the Chinese cultural revolution. Where previously and afterwards students and teachers got along just like everywhere else in the world, i.e. not in perfect harmony, but not killing each other either, in 1966 Mao began emphasizing how China's youth is the vanguard of the revolution and how authority figures are always holding them back.
Thus we have a moment in which group interests (those of students not always in perfect harmony with their teachers)** came together with the interests of a certain part of the political elite (Mao and some allies) to form a group consciousness among much of China's youth (first sentence). The whole point of the exercise was of course a power struggle at the top of the CCP (second sentence). Consequently, a wide range of very normal teacher/student conflicts were reframed as "reactionary teacher vs. progressive student", and regularly taken as a reason to commit violence (third sentence).
On the other hand there of course can be conflicts along community lines without any influence from political elites or from any colonial politics. A typical example might be conflicts between settled and nomadic groups, whjch very easily arise from a direct competition for natural resources. You can find hints of this rather early in the bible (the murder of Abel) and lots and lots of examples from written history.
*though it should be noted that neither Daoism nor Buddhism have the "you shall have no other god beside me" that Abrahamitic religions such as Islam have. I.e. there are many people who may be both Buddhist and Daoist at the same time.
**high school students tend to think they have an interest in schools being closed (at least for a while), in a break from ordinary school routine, and in getting rid of teachers they do not like.
Upvote:4
If you believe that all history is about 'class conflict'- i.e. rich vs poor- and that 'Religion is the opium of the masses' (i.e. rich people use Religion to fool the poor) then you will also believe that Hindu and/or Muslim communal consciousness or communalism (are) forms of ideology or discourse connected to class, group, and elite political interests.
Thus, if Hindus and Muslims in a particular town killed each other because a pig wandered into a mosque or a cow was killed near a Temple then the real cause of the violence was that
The details might vary, but the basic idea is that all problems are caused either by Hindu businessmen or else by Muslim 'feudal' landlords.
In this perspective, the creation or development of communal consciousness is an instrument of struggle, either against the British or between Hindus and Muslims for political advantage or supremacy.
In other words, either the 'neo-feudal' Muslim landlords are brainwashing poor Muslims so that they will fight against Hindus or else 'proto-capitalist' Hindus are brainwashing poor Hindus so that they will fight against Muslims. It is not the case that either Muslims or Hindus would organize on the basis of religion absent some Machiavellian trick played either by 'feudal' landlords or by 'capitalist' merchants.
The problem with this view is that there is evidence of Hindu and Muslim political organizations working against the British (e.g. Khilafat campaign). This is rationalized as the desire of Muslim 'feudal' landlords to throw off irksome British laws or else of 'capitalist' Hindus intent on monopolizing the Indian economy.
The later fight between Hindus and Sikhs vs. Muslims was seen as either
In the course of struggle, communal violence could be and often was the result of conflicts framed within a communal discourse. It is true that Hindus and Muslims killed each other without ever mentioning feudalism or Capitalism. But this was only because there was something called 'communal discourse' which was a system of thought, knowledge, or communication which constructed Indian experience of the world. Thus before the problem of feudalism (i.e the power of landlords) or Capitalism (i.e. the activities of merchants) can be tackled, Academics must first 'deconstruct' or 'subvert' 'communal discourse'. This will cause ordinary people to wake up from an evil enchantment. They will realize they aren't Hindu or Muslim or Punjabi or Sindhi. They are whatever it is these academics think they should be. Once this happens, everybody will start behaving very differently. Thus these historians, or sociologists or political scientists will have brought about a miraculous change in Society just by writing in this vacuous manner.
Great mischief has been done in India by giving credence to this shallow view. Vide http://socioproctology.blogspot.com/2012/08/paul-brass-on-partition-genocide.html