Since 2014, the ultranationalist and religious-extremist ideologues of the RSS, operating through the BJP’s Hindutva-driven policies, have systematically eroded the secular fabric of India. This trajectory has now taken another deeply troubling turn.
The BJP leadership, led by Narendra Modi, regrettably the Prime Minister of India, has chosen to commemorate the so-called “1000 years of Somnath,” marketing it as a civilizational milestone.
In reality, this is not an act of historical remembrance but one of political desperation.As economic stress intensifies, unemployment remains unresolved, social cohesion weakens, and electoral certainties begin to erode, the BJP–RSS ecosystem has once again resorted to its most familiar instrument: ultra-nationalist religious spectacle, designed to inflame identity, deflect accountability, and revive waning political support.
This is not about history. It is about regaining slipping political capital by inflaming identity. Somnath is merely the stage.
The ultranationalist and religious extremist ruling establishment of BJP attempt to projects Mahmud Ghaznavi as the singular destroyer of Hindu civilization, turning a complex medieval episode into a morality play of eternal Hindu victimhood via distorting history. This reductionist framing is not accidental. It is a calculated attempt to re-energize a fatigued base through emotional mobilization, grievance politics, and religious extremism masquerading as nationalism.
Somnath was never a passive spiritual sanctuary. It was a state temple, inseparable from royal authority, economic power, and political legitimacy. In early medieval India, temples functioned as treasuries, landholding institutions, and administrative centers. Attacking a rival’s temple was a declaration of victory over their sovereignty. This is a basic historical fact, conveniently erased from today’s political narrative.
Long before Mahmud Ghaznavi ever crossed the Indus, Hindu kings had already normalized the destruction of rival Hindu temples as instruments of power.Rashtrakuta emperor Govinda III devastated Pratihara-controlled regions in the early 9th century, looting towns and royal shrines tied to enemy authority. Across the 9th and 10th centuries, the Paramaras, Chalukyas, and Pratiharas routinely smashed each other’s temples in Gujarat andbeyond. Shaiva rulers attacked Vaishnava shrines; new dynasties erased the religious symbols of defeated ones.
Temple desecration was not sacrilege, it was statecraft.Somnath itself was attacked, looted, rebuilt, and reasserted multiple times across centuries, by Hindu rulers, by Muslim rulers, and by shifting regimes seeking to control Gujarat’s most powerful royal shrine. To isolate Mahmud Ghaznavi’s raid of 1026 CE as a singular civilizational trauma is not historical analysis; it is political fabrication.
Mahmud did what conquerors across cultures and eras did: he struck at the most potent symbol of enemy power. His raid became famous not because it was unprecedented, but because it was amplified, repeatedly retold, and later mythologized. What the current regime does is take that myth and weaponize it.
The Author is a young Sikh Scholar and Activist born in Quetta, Balochistan.