In a total turnaround from campaigning for freeing temples last year, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev has commented that there is no sense in talking about temples razed during invasions. At a time when temples destroyed and encroached by invaders are being reclaimed through a meticulous legal process, Jaggi’s comment is seen as an attempt to scuttle those efforts.

Speaking to India Today at the Davos World Economic Forum, he said that it doesn’t make any sense to talk about temples razed during invasions as history cannot be rewritten. “We could not protect them then. Now, talking about them doesn’t make sense because you cannot rewrite history,” he said. He further said, “The two communities [Hindus and Muslims] should sit together and work out which two-three sites are iconic and settle it.”

His followers defended the statement saying if Hindus want to reclaim every temple occupied by a mosque, it will only invite conflict in the country. However, the fact is that the Hindu community has been patiently going through due process in a democratic country like Bharat to reclaim what is theirs despite provocations. Even to reclaim “the iconic places” like Ayodhya, Kashi and Madhura, as Jaggi calls them, Hindus had to fight for decades.

It is surprising to note that Jaggi wants to overlook the fact that Muslims didn’t even let the survey committee appointed by the court to inspect Gyanvapi and reportedly tried to erase evidence by drilling the Shivling inside wuzukhana and using cement on it to make it look like a fountain. Jaggi’s comments come at a time when even gullible Hindus who thought reclaiming Ayodhya, Kashi, and, Madhura would be enough, changed their mindset after seeing the kind of humiliation and sacrilege Baba Vishwanath was subjected to by Muslims using the well as wuzukhana.

Desecrating the Shivling by performing ablutions around it and drilling a hole in it to claim it to be a fountain are nothing short of what the barbarous Moghul invaders did by placing murtis on the steps of mosques built after destroying temples. Perhaps for a godman who sells Bhagwan Shiva’s name but never wears the sacred ash, the foremost identity of a Shiva bhakta, it doesn’t matter. But for the ordinary Hindus not after the fame, wealth, and influence, Hindu Dharma brings to corporate babas, it is a wrong that needs to not only be corrected but paid back as well.

VS Naipaul once said “Today, it seems to me that Indians are becoming alive to their history… [the invaders] were conquering, they were subjugating. And they were in a country where people never understood this…Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalizing of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before…What is happening in India is a mighty creative process.” while talking about the Ram Janma Bhoomi movement.

What is happening now with regards to Kashi and Mathura is a continuation of that creative process through which the Hindu society attempts to close its civilizational wounds. In another interview, Naipaul said “I think India has lived with one major extended event, that began about 1000 AD, the Muslim invasion. It meant the cracking open and partial wrecking of what was a complete cultural, religious world until that invasion. I don’t think the people of India have been able to come to terms with that wrecking. I don’t think they understand what really happened. It’s too painful.”

But now, the Hindu society is starting to understand the wreck caused by Mohammedan invaders and the reason behind it both from their actions in the past and their descendants’ actions in the present. So corporate babas who are after the Nobel must sell their ‘soil’ elsewhere.