In the years following the BJP's ascension to power at the centre, a flurry of critiques claiming to expose the intellectual rationale for Hindu nationalism has appeared. From the philosophy of Chetan Bhatt's Liberation and Purity (1997) and the rationalism of Meera Nanda's Breaking the Spell of Dharma (2003) to the varied Marxisms of Achin Vanaik's The Furies of Indian Communalism (1997) and Radhika Desai's Slouching Toward Ayodhya (2002), they have commonly indicted the follies of Indian anti-secularism for ‘sharing discursive space’ with Hindutva.

It is no doubt true that the ascendancy of the postcolonial critique of modernity assigns it a powerful voice in debates around the legitimacy of state secularism in India. Since it has long since concerned itself with posing a political as well as an epistemological challenge to Western power, postcolonial reason has led in the front lines of a battle of ideological wills which has split India's contemporary Left.

Nanda, for example, writes that postcolonial studies aided and abetted the meteoric coming to hegemony of cultural nationalism and the cultivation of the religious vote bank.