Power, Memory and the Language of Revenge
When the State Speaks Revenge: History, Security and the Unmaking of India’s Composite Republic
When a National Security Advisor urges the youth of a nation to "avenge history," the statement cannot be treated as a rhetorical lapse. Ajit Doval’s address at the Viksit Bharat Young Leaders Dialogue (10 January 2026) marks a significant moment in India’s contemporary political discourse: the open normalisation of revenge as a legitimate force in nation-building. Even as he qualified that revenge is “not a good word,” he immediately rehabilitated it as a productive and mobilising sentiment.
Such language is not innocuous. When deployed by a functionary occupying the apex of the national security architecture, it signals a deliberate ideological shift—one that seeks to reframe history not as a field of inquiry but as a reservoir of grievance. Memory, in this formulation, is not meant to enlighten; it is meant to mobilise.
This essay argues that the contemporary invocation of historical revenge represents a dangerous convergence of selective historiography, majoritarian politics, and bureaucratic power. It threatens India’s composite social fabric, distorts its past, and weakens—rather than strengthens—its national security.
The Political Use of History
Modern political projects frequently mine history for legitimacy, but the current moment is distinguished by the reduction of a complex millennium into a singular narrative of Hindu victimhood and Muslim aggression. The repeated references to "subjugation" and "attacks" implicitly point to medieval India, with Somnath Temple functioning as a recurring symbol.
Professional historiography, however, offers no support to this civilisational binary. As Romila Thapar has consistently argued, pre-modern Indian polities cannot be understood through the lens of modern religious identities [1]. States were organised around power, territory, revenue extraction, and military capacity—not around the religious homogenisation of subjects.
Richard M. Eaton’s seminal work on temple desecration demonstrates that such acts were politically contingent and economically motivated, directed at sites of wealth and sovereignty rather than faith per se [2]. Temples functioned as treasuries, landholders, and symbols of rival authority. Their destruction was a strategy of conquest, not theological annihilation.
The oft-cited case of Mohammad Ghazni illustrates this point clearly. Ghazni did not attack Somnath because it was Hindu, but because it was exceptionally wealthy. If iconoclasm had been his objective, the subcontinent offered countless targets. Moreover, Ghazni’s campaigns were enabled by Indian collaborators, including Hindu rulers and generals—among them Tilak, a Hindu general in Ghazni’s army, a fact rarely acknowledged in communal retellings.
Conversely, temple destruction was not confined to Muslim rulers. Kalhana’s Rajatarangini records that the Kashmiri Hindu king Harsha (Harsh Dev) created a state department specifically to loot temples and melt idols for revenue during fiscal crises [3]. To read these actions as religious zealotry is to misunderstand the political economy of pre-modern states.
Rulers, Not Religions
Indian history decisively undermines the notion of rule by religion. Muslim dynasties depended heavily on Hindu generals, administrators, and financiers. Akbar’s empire rested on figures such as Raja Man Singh and Raja Todar Mal. Hemu rose to become chief general and de facto ruler of Delhi under the Sur regime. Irfan Habib has shown that Mughal governance was structurally inclusive, drawing elites across religious lines into the mansabdari system [4].
The traffic of power ran both ways. Hindu rulers routinely employed Muslim officers for their expertise in cavalry, artillery, and naval warfare. Shivaji Maharaj’s forces included Muslim commanders such as Siddi Ibrahim, Darya Sarang, Daulat Khan, and Ibrahim Khan Gardi. Vijayanagara kings recruited Turkish archers and artillery specialists and even constructed mosques for Muslim soldiers in their service [5].
Marriage alliances further complicate communal historiography. Mughal emperors—Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan—married Rajput princesses as part of political alliances. These were not symbolic gestures of tolerance but pragmatic strategies of statecraft. Such alliances make little sense within a framework that imagines perpetual religious hostility.
Aurangzeb, routinely portrayed as a religious fanatic, issued farmans granting land and revenue to several Hindu temples, including those at Varanasi, Umanand (Guwahati), and Chitrakoot. As Satish Chandra notes, Aurangzeb’s policies were shaped more by political exigencies than by a uniform religious agenda [6]. Acknowledging this does not sanitise his reign, but it does dismantle caricature.
Colonial Historiography and Communal Frames
The communal reading of Indian history owes much to colonial scholarship. After the 1857 uprising—where Hindus and Muslims fought together under Bahadur Shah Zafar—the British administration recognised that unity posed the greatest threat to imperial rule. History writing was reorganised to emphasise Hindu–Muslim antagonism, categorising eras as "Hindu" or "Muslim" rule. British domination, notably, was never described as "Christian rule."
This historiographical move reduced rulers to their religious identities and erased centuries of shared governance. As Bipan Chandra observed, communal history transforms political conflicts into civilisational ones, converting material struggles for power into moral narratives of eternal hatred [7].
Independent India never fully dismantled this framework. Instead, it is now being actively revived for political mobilisation.
Somnath and the Manufacture of Grievance
The renewed political focus on Somnath—one thousand years after Ghazni’s raid—reveals less about medieval history than about contemporary politics. The temple was rebuilt in 1951 with state support in independent India. To frame its present-day celebration as an act of historical revenge raises an unavoidable question: revenge against whom?
Mahmud of Ghazni is long dead. His empire has vanished. Translating medieval violence into modern grievance inevitably redirects hostility toward present-day Muslim citizens, who bear no historical responsibility for events a millennium old. This is not remembrance; it is political provocation.
Bureaucracy, Ideology and Security
The current moment is particularly troubling because ideological mobilisation is increasingly articulated through the language of national security. Ajit Doval’s long association with the Vivekananda International Foundation, and the proximity of similar organisations to the state apparatus, reflect a blurring of lines between governance and ideology.
Security discourse traditionally seeks stability, cohesion, and risk mitigation. The rhetoric of revenge does the opposite. It deepens internal fractures, legitimises suspicion, and diverts attention from institutional accountability—particularly in the aftermath of major security failures such as Pathankot, Uri, Pulwama, Pahalgam and subsequent attacks.
Internal polarisation is not a sign of strength; it is a strategic vulnerability.
Vivekananda and the Question of Dignity
The irony of contemporary Hindutva discourse is its selective invocation of Hindu thinkers. Swami Vivekananda repeatedly warned that conversions among Dalits and oppressed communities were driven not by theology but by humiliation and social exclusion. People, he argued, sought dignity where Hindu society denied it.
This diagnosis remains profoundly relevant. A civilisation unwilling to confront caste oppression but eager to avenge imagined historical wrongs is avoiding reform in favour of resentment.
Composite Culture Under Strain
India’s composite culture survived conquest, empire, colonialism, and Partition. It is now under strain not from external invasion but from internal radicalisation. Since the 1990s, and with greater intensity after 2014, political mobilisation has increasingly relied on religious polarisation.
Every symbolic gesture, legislative act, or rhetorical flourish appears calibrated to remind minorities of their conditional belonging and majorities of their supposed historical victimhood. This is not nation-building; it is the manufacture of permanent anxiety.
Conclusion: History Without Revenge
History does not demand vengeance; it demands understanding. A confident nation interrogates its past to learn, not to inflame. When those entrusted with national security normalise revenge, they undermine the very foundations of social cohesion and democratic citizenship.
India’s greatness has never rested on religious uniformity or historical retribution. It has rested on its ability to absorb difference, negotiate power, and sustain pluralism.
To abandon that inheritance in favour of revenge is not strength. It is surrender.
References
[1] Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History, Oxford University Press.
[2] Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India, Hope India.
[3] Kalhana, Rajatarangini.
[4] Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, Oxford University Press.
[5] Burton Stein, Vijayanagara, Cambridge University Press.
[6] Satish Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals, Har-Anand.
[7] Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India, Vikas Publishing.
