The result has been as predictable as it is iniquitous and absurd: if Ram Sharan sets up an engineering college, the state as well as the university … - Arun Shourie

Even as moves are afoot to get the Andhra judgment reversed, the government has directed the armed forces to count soldiers and officers by their religion. Nor is this move an inadvertence. It has arisen as a result of a committee that the government has appointed under a former chief justice of Delhi, Rajinder Sachar -each member of which has been carefully selected for his ‘secular’ beliefs. Each term of reference on which it is to supply information and make recommendations, as we noted at the outset, has been just as carefully selected to justify reservations and other concessions to Muslims as a religious group.

But there is an even more potent cause for the near total erasure of such material from our public discourse and our instruction. And that is the form of “secularism” which we have practised these forty-five years: a “secularism” in which double-standards have been the norm, one in which everything that may remove the dross by which our national identity has been covered has become anathema.

Clearly, what our newsmen call 'hard-liners' have been vindicated.