Somnath temple is ready to celebrate its golden jubilee. And during the Ayodhya debate in Parliament and subsequently in his article, "Musings from Kuamarakom," Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee extrapolated his argument from the speech of Dr Rajendra Prasad, then President of India, on May 11 1951 at the inaugural ceremony of the Somnath temple, with whose reconstruction many prominent Congressmen, including members of Nehru's cabinet, were associated.

The argument predictably needled the present Congress party, which sneeringly contradicted the Prime Minister's speech, stating that, besides Nehru's dissent against the renovation work, cabinet ministers and Dr Prasad were involved in their personal capacities. This is not a fact.

National heroes and cultural heritage should be invoked to raise people's morale and national consciousness, not to promote any revivalist cause. European history is replete with such instances. In 1895 a stray article by Tilak in the Kesari on 23 April gave an impetus to the repair of Shivaji tomb at Raigarh in Kolaba.

The tomb's repair gave an impetus to the anti-imperialist movement. Somnath temple in Junagadh State, which fell to ruin from repeated attacks by Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11th century, was a poignant testimony of external aggression and religious intolerance, which medieval India suffered. KM Munshi's novel "Jai Somnath" (1938) dealt with the importance of Somnath. Thus, soon after the integration of the Junagarh state with the Indian Union in 1947 Sardar Patel, then Union Home Minister, took a pledge to rebuild it. He got wide-ranging support, including within the Congress party and the Government. While two Union Cabinet ministers, NV Gadgil and KM Munshi, were part of the Somnath Trust, Dr Rajendra Prasad looked after the trust's financial matters.

The approval for reconstruction came from the union cabinet itself. The Government appointed an advisory committee with KM Munshi as the chairman to oversee the shrine's reconstruction. Even Mahatma Gandhi advised that construction should be done with money from public donations; and Sardar Patel undertook to collect one crore rupees.

The reconstruction of Somnath temple set off a historic debate within the Congress on the twin issues of the roots of India's cultural nationalism and the meaning of secularism in India. Nehru failed to go beyond his shibboleth that the reconstruction would hurt India's image as a secular country. In his letters to chief ministers on August 1, 1951, he said, "It is little realised here what great injuries to our credit abroad is done by the communal organisations of India, because they represent just the things which a Western mind dislikes intensely and cannot understand. The recent inauguration of the Somnath temple with pomp and ceremony created a very bad impression abroad about India and her professions." His opposition betrayed ambiguities and hypocrisy in his ideological overtures. He wrote to Dr Prasad on March 2, 1951, saying he had differed on the timing of the reconstruction.

It was two mindsets contending with each other. For Nehru it was an act of revivalism. However, Dr Prasad and others took exception to Nehru's approach, which failed to weld the medieval and modern political history of India with its ancient cultural heritage. This heritage predates the advent of semitic religions, for India's pluralism cannot be delineated only in terms of presence of Islam or Christianity. India is plural in ethos and spirit; Hinduism continued to give birth to new sects and philosophies, many of them contradicting and challenging one other.

Nehru had no answer to the question that emerged from how the reconstruction of the ancient shrine, destroyed by an aggressor, discounted secularism. Dr Rajendra Prasad described Somnath temple as a symbol of national faith and said, "By rising from its ashes again, this temple of Somnath is to say proclaiming to the world that no man and no power in the world can destroy that for which people have boundless faith and love in their hearts... Today, our attempt is not to rectify history. Our only aim is to proclaim anew our attachment to the faith, convictions and to the values on which our religion has rested since immemorial ages."

If for Mahmud of Ghazni the destruction of Somnath was a sign of victory of Islam (he was rewarded for it by the Caliph); for Pakistan, its renovation was - as evident from a resolution passed in a public meeting in Karachi on 2th May 1951, an act of insult to Muslim. As Pakistan Radio went into anti-renovation propaganda, Nehru made a retort to Liaquat Ali Khan. In another instance, Mahatma Gandhi rebuked an Indian (Urdu) journal, which wrote that another Ghazni had to come to undo what was being done in Somnath.

Dr Rajendra Prasad or Sardar Patel's determination to remain associated with the Somnath reconstruction was not only a matter of personal conviction but an expression of quest for Indian paradigm of secularism and cultural nationalism. Nehru's isolation was axiomatic. The reconstruction of Somnath temple helped to exorcise the painful memory that was haunting the Hindu psyche and brought tremendous exultation - as Munshi wrote to Nehru on 24th April 1951 - to "the Collective Sub-Conscience of India." However, this quest which began with the collective efforts of Congressman of Tilak school of thought could not be sustained owing to lack of academic and media support, giving, as a result, an upper hand to the Nehruvian stream of thought.