Chandrahas of The Middle Stage has an interesting post on Mukul Kesavan’s The Ugliness of the Indian Male and other propositions.

Even if, in the beginning, the Congress’s pluralist definition of nationalism was strategic, designed to bring the largest number on board in a Noah’s Ark kind of way, over the sixty years of the independence struggle it became something like a reflex. Thus it was that, despite the horrors of Partition, India did not go down the road of being a Hindu nation. Our secular constitution, in Kesavan’s telling, enshrined this liberal and hospitable nationalism in law. Although the Congress itself has been unable to live up to its legacy, the historical triumph of the Congress, writes Kesavan, “is that every party must now lay claim to the virtue of being secular. The meaning of secularism can be contested (truly secular/pseudo-secular), but it is a value, like democracy, that no mainstream party can publicly repudiate.”

There’s also a fascinating discussion taking place in the comments, so do take a look.