‘The old certitudes of Indian politics had crumbled,’ as academic Sunil Khilnani put it in his book The Idea of India in the late 1990s, referring to the declining power of secular nationalism in Indian politics. ‘Yet one powerful continuity stretched across this half-century of spectacular and often turbulent events: the presence of a democratic state.’ Liberals like Khilnani often regretted this decline in India’s secular identity, and its eclipse by powerful religious, caste-based and linguistic political movements. Others blamed the complexities of democratic rule for India’s slow economic
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