It has become a tradition that no major public occasion for Prime Minister Narendra Modi is complete without a pointed reference to Jawaharlal Nehru.
While announcing the Somnath Swabhiman Parv, marking a thousand years since the first attack on the Somnath temple, Modi wrote in his blog that “the then Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was not too enthused with this development. He did not want the Honourable President as well as Ministers to associate with this special event. He said that this event created a bad impression of India.”
It is a selective narrative, highlighting Nehru’s supposed failure. To know the fuller story one needs to return to the archival speeches and correspondence of the time. It reveals a far more careful debate about faith, State power, and the meaning of secularism in a newly independent India.
Long before Nehru entered this debate, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had drawn clear limits on State involvement in religious reconstruction.
In a post-prayer speech on November 28, 1947, Gandhi had spoken of proposals to fund the renovation of Somnath and recalled asking Sardar Patel whether a government could spend public money on Hinduism. Patel’s response was unequivocal.
“That was not possible so long as he was alive,” Gandhi recalled him saying. “Not a single pie could be taken out from the treasury of Junagadh for the renovation of the Somnath temple.”
Gandhi underlined the principle at stake: The government was “secular, not theocratic”, and therefore “cannot spend money on the basis of communities. For it, the only thing that matters is that all are Indians.”
It was K.M. Munshi who most passionately sought to give Somnath a larger civilisational meaning.
Well known for his historical novels in Gujarati — especially the celebrated trilogy Patan-ni-Prabhuta (The Glory of Patan), Gujarat-no-Nath (The Lord and Master of Gujarat), and Rajadhiraj (The King of Kings) — Munshi was, and remains, a widely read Gujarati novelist.
He did view the reconstruction of Somnath as a historical mission tied to Hindu asmita, a term he helped coin and popularise to denote civilisational self-respect and cultural identity. This vocabulary, which later became central to Hindu nationalist psychology, framed historical memory in terms of loss, humiliation and revival.
Munshi articulated this perspective in his historical novel Jay Somnath, first published in Gujarati in 1940, which cast the temple’s history as a narrative of destruction and resurgence.
In Pilgrimage to Freedom, he described Somnath as “a symbol of the immortal spirit of Hindu culture, which no invader could destroy”, and argued that its reconstruction was “not an act of piety alone; it is an expression of our national self-respect and cultural continuity”.
This religious nationalism later found institutional expression in Munshi’s role as a founding president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964. While Munshi accepted that the reconstruction should rely on public contributions rather than State funds, his insistence on projecting Somnath as a national symbol inevitably blurred the boundary between cultural mobilisation and constitutional secularism.
LK Advani launches his Rath Yatra from Somnath in 1990
Nehru’s objections must be read against this backdrop. In his letter to the chief ministers on May 2, 1951, he stressed that the Somnath ceremony was “not governmental” and warned that “we must not do anything which comes in the way of our State being secular”, cautioning against “many communal tendencies at work in India today”.
Nehru had no issue with the temple, but his real concern was the authority of the State being harnessed to religious symbolism. India, after all, had been independent barely four years. Partition had claimed thousands of lives, communal wounds were still raw, and the institutions of the republic were fragile.
This tension had surfaced also when President Rajendra Prasad expressed his wish to preside over the inauguration. In his reply dated March 2, 1951, Nehru argued that while individuals were free to participate in religious ceremonies, the President, as the constitutional head of a secular republic, should not be officially associated with one.
His unease deepened when reports emerged that the Saurashtra government had allocated 5 lakh rupees for the installation ceremony.
Writing on April 22, 1951, Nehru called it “completely improper”, adding that at a time when “starvation stalks the land”, such expenditure was “almost shocking”, especially since spending on education and health had been curtailed.
Despite these objections, President Prasad attended the inauguration on May 11, 1951, claiming to do so in a personal capacity.
The episode has since become a touchstone in debates on Indian secularism, not because Nehru opposed Somnath, but because he insisted on a clear constitutional boundary between faith and the authority of the State.
His anxiety was rooted in the belief that religious symbolism, once legitimised by government power, acquires a political afterlife far beyond its immediate moment.
That political afterlife became evident decades later. The civilisational idiom popularised by Munshi was consciously adopted by the BJP.
In 1990, L.K. Advani launched his Rath Yatra from Somnath in Gujarat, deliberately invoking the temple’s symbolism, and proceeded towards Ayodhya. The mobilisation culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, followed by widespread communal violence that claimed hundreds of lives.
Politically, the movement transformed the BJP’s electoral fortunes, helping it emerge as a major force in national politics and significantly expand its presence in subsequent Lok Sabha elections.
The arc from Somnath to Ayodhya thus illustrates how religious symbolism can produce consequences far removed from its original historical context — the danger Nehru had warned against in 1951.
By portraying Nehru’s caution as reluctance or national embarrassment, Modi’s blog offers a piecemeal of history. The archival record shows that Nehru’s position flowed from the same secular ethic articulated by Gandhi and affirmed by Patel — that religious revival, however deeply felt, must remain outside the domain of the State.
To see the Somnath issue from religious nationalism’s glasses has political purposes. It replaces constitutional restraint with civilisational triumphalism. In doing so, the past is simplified to serve the needs of the present.