The renaissance route

A millennium later, militant Islam and later crusading Christianity came to India, and aggressively challenged Hinduism. They seized power and established their own state in India. But despite state patronage to the ensuing onslaught and victimization, Hinduism as the religion could not be decimated, and it remained the theology of the vast Indian majority. Defiant Hindus suffered persecution and differential taxation (such as through jezia and zamindari) but refused to capitulate and convert. Even after almost a thousand years of such targeting, undivided India in 1947 was more than 75 per cent Hindu. The Vijayanagaram, Mahratta kingdoms, and later the freedom movement, inspired by sanyasis such as Sringeri Sankaracharya, Swami Ramdas, Swami Vivekanada, and Sri Aurobindo, ensured that the flame of Hindu defiance never dimmed.

In 1947, temporal power was de facto restored to the Hindu majority. But the Indian state formally adopted secularism as a principle, which however was never properly defined or debated. It was foisted on the Indian masses. Hence the renaissance that had begun in the late nineteenth century to redefine the Hindu identity in contemporary norms valid in a pluralistic society was aborted by the confusion thus created in Hindu minds by secularism. Source Who Can Save India? by swamijyoti