Colonial mindset hurt India's traditions: Yogi Adityanath on Somnath temple debate

A Civilisation That Rebuilds 17 Times Is Not Defeated — It Is Teaching

Yogi Adityanath's recent statement on the Somnath temple controversy has cracked open something the Indian establishment has spent 75 years trying to keep sealed: we were taught to forget our own resilience.

What Actually Happened

The Somnath temple was destroyed 17 times. Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026. Aurangzeb in 1706. Each time, it was rebuilt. Not by government decree. Not by political movements. By the civilisational memory of a people who refused amnesia.

When British archaeologists arrived in India, they looked at Somnath's ruins and called it "rubble of a barbaric past." When independent India came, Pandit Nehru's secular framework — well-intentioned but historically amnesiac — didn't celebrate this rebuilt temple as a monument to cultural resurrection. Instead, it buried the narrative. The temple was rebuilt, yes. But the memory of why it had to be rebuilt 17 times? That story vanished from school textbooks, from national consciousness, from the way Indians told themselves who they were.

This is not about archaeology. This is about what a nation chooses to remember about itself.

What This Means for India

Here is what Yogi has named that Delhi's intellectual class has avoided for decades: the colonial wound runs deeper than conquest. Conquest you can fight with weapons. But when colonizers teach you that your own gods are backward, your own architecture is primitive, your own resilience is barbaric — that becomes internalized. That becomes shame.

We did not just lose military battles. We lost the permission to celebrate our own victories. A child studying in an Indian school in 2024 learns about the Industrial Revolution in Europe with reverence. But ask her about a temple rebuilt 17 times and she will not know the story. That asymmetry is the real loot. Not gold. Not resources. The erasure of our own civilisational memory.

Yogi's statement matters because it names what the secular establishment could never say: that forgetting your own history is a form of ongoing colonization. It does not require a foreign governor. It requires only that you teach your children that their ancestors were not intelligent enough, strong enough, or worthy enough to be remembered.

The Deeper Story Nobody Is Telling

The Somnath debate is being framed as Hindu nationalism versus secular values. This is wrong. It is actually about whether a nation has the right to remember itself accurately.

If you erase the story of 17 rebuildings, you erase the data about what makes a civilization survive. You lose the pattern. And in losing the pattern, you lose the blueprint for the next century. A people that knows it has rebuilt 17 times faces future destruction differently. It does not ask "will we survive?" It asks "how will we rebuild?" That is not religion. That is survival intelligence.

The secular framework said: forget the religious narrative, focus on progress. But progress without memory is like building a bridge without understanding the river. You will build it in the wrong place, the wrong way, and it will fail for reasons you cannot diagnose.

The Vedic Pattern

Vedic civilization encoded a pattern that Somnath demonstrates: Kshaya-Ksara-Punar-Nirmaan. Destruction. Loss. Rebuilding. This is not defeat. This is the rhythm of manifestation itself. The seasons die and return. Civilizations face annihilation and return. Matter dissolves and reforms. This is not mythology. This is physics understood as dharma.

A civilization that knows this pattern does not panic during destruction. It prepares for return. It does not ask if it deserves to exist. It knows that existence itself is the right, and return is inevitable.

The Question for 2026

If Bharat stops erasing its own victories, if a child in a Hindi-medium school in Indore learns that her ancestors rebuilt Somnath 17 times and asked for nothing in return except the right to pray — what becomes possible in the next 100 years?

That is not a religious question. That is a civilisational one.

Follow BHARAT DECODED on Telegram: t.me/DecodedByRDS — Rajnish Sharma (RDS)