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the battle for secularism was not lost in the courts or elections... Secularism was defeated in the minds of the Indian citizens...They were just the beneficiaries of the colossal failure of secular politics...Today, we must recognise that secularism was defeated because its custodians refused to engage in a battle of ideas among the people. Secularism was defeated because the secular elite talked down to its critics in English https://theprint.in/opinion/secularism-language-religion-ayodhya-bhoomi-pujan-ram-mandir-kashmir/475307/

 Yogendra Yadav.. says secularism was “defeated because it failed to connect with the language of traditions, because it refused to learn or speak the language of our religions.” Yet it is the same language of traditions and religions that have sanctified social inequality -- Ajaz Ashraf in What Yogendra Yadav, Pratap Bhanu Mehta Don’t Get About Secularism: https://www.newsclick.in/What-Yogendra-Yadav-Pratap-Bhanu-Mehta-Don%27t-Get-About-Secularism

This is a fashionable claim with surface plausibility. But, on reflection, this claim is historically problematic, philosophically dubious and culturally dangerous.- Bhanu Pratap Mehta-  https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/secularism-pratap-bhanu-mehta-yogendra-yadav-ayodhya-ram-temple-babri-masjid-6549335/

 

whenever religious themes were brought into politics, whether in the quotidian policies that were enacted after Congress governments were elected in 1935, or in the larger ideological project or idiom, they generated conflict. So the idea that taking religion seriously as a political matter will solve the communal problem is a historically dubious proposition. Modern religious politics is born in the crucible of democracy and nationalism, not theology....In a post-mortem of secularism, we are hand wringing over religion, not because we lost the key there, but because there seems to be light there. The deeper question is not these ideological debates; after all, differences are inevitable and can be managed. It is the growing tolerance for prejudice and the unleashing of a ferocious darkness. Let us name the beast for what it is and not hide behind the pieties of secularism or religion. Recovering the project will not mean a return to religion, but a confidence in the promise of a new freedom struggle to salvage individual dignity and rights, not continually play out resentments against the Other.

 

In his paper, The Rise of the Other Backward Classes in the Hindi Belt, Christophe Jaffrelot shows that 1967 saw the election of a number of lower-caste MLAs, particularly Yadavs, “whose number had increased so much as to be just behind the Rajputs (14.8 per cent as against 24.1 per cent.).”