On Friday (3rd February), Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on X (formerly Twitter) that veteran BJP leader LK Advani will be conferred India’s highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna. While making the announcement, PM Modi hailed Advani describing him as, “One of the most respected statesmen of our times, his contribution to the development of India is monumental.” PM Modi also enlisted major achievements of BJP stalwart throughout his decades-long service in public life.
LK Advani who was born in an undivided India, rose from a kid born to a migrant Hindu family to the face of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. He served as the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party for the longest period since its inception in 1980.
Here is a brief overview of how he played a key role in shaping Indian polity for decades.
Initial life, RSS Swamsevak
Lal Krishna Advani was born on 8th November 1927, to a Sindhi Hindu business family residing in Karachi, Sindh – an erstwhile part of undivided India under the control of the British. He completed his schooling at Saint Patrick’s High School, Karachi, Sindh, and enrolled in Government College Hyderabad, Sindh.
At the age of 14, Advani joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1941 and steadfastly started attending the Karachi shakha. His stature among the Sangh ranks grew as he became a pracharak of the Karachi branch of the RSS. He was later designated as the Secretary of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Karachi, in 1947.
In the aftermath of partition, his family migrated to India and settled down in Bombay, where he graduated in Law from the Government Law College of the Bombay University.
After the partition, he extensively worked in Alwar, Bharatpur, Kota, Bundi, and Jhalawar as a Pracharak until 1952. Advani started his political career as secretary to SS Bhandari, who was General Secretary of Jana Sangha, a political party formed by Syama Prasad Mookharjee in association with RSS in 1951.
In 1957, Advani moved to Delhi and soon became general secretary and then President of the Delhi unit of the party. In 1967, he was elected as the chairman of the First Delhi Metropolitan Council. In 1970, he became a member of the Rajya Sabha for six years.
After serving the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in various capacities, he became its President in 1973 at the Kanpur session of the party working committee meeting. In 1970, Advani became a member of the Rajya Sabha from Delhi, and was reelected in 1976, during the emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi.
Post abrogation of Emergency, in 1977 when elections were called, Jana Sangha merged with Janata Party along with many other parties to contest Lok Sabha elections. Advani, along with his colleague former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee had fought the Lok Sabha elections.
They won the elections held after the Emergency. Afterward, Janata Party made LK Advani the Minister of Information and Broadcasting. At that time, Vajpayee was made Foreign Minister, and Morarji Desai became the Prime Minister.
However, Jana Sangh faced internal conflicts which forced several leaders of Jana Sangh to part ways. Advani too quit the Janata Party and formed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) along with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and others. Advani was one of the distinguished leaders of the newly founded party BJP and was elected to Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh for two terms starting in 1982.
BJP’s embrace of Hindutva and Ram Janmabhoomi movement under the leadership of LK Advani
Under the leadership of Advani, the party aligned itself with the ideology of Hindutva. It unreservedly put its weight behind the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in Ayodhya.
During the early 1980s, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) launched a movement for the construction of a Mandir dedicated to Lord Rama at the site where the disputed Babri structure was standing. The BJP extended their support to the movement, including it in their poll manifesto. The party secured a massive upswing in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections. From winning just 2 seats in the 1984 elections, the BJP won a staggering 85 Lok Sabha seats in the general elections in 1989, becoming the third largest party in Lok Sabha after Congress and Janata Dal.
The tally was remarkably impressive for just a decade-old party. Owing to its upswing, Congress fell short of the majority mark and it declined to form a government. As a result, the VP Singh-led National Front Government came to power, supported by the BJP and the left parties from the outside.
During this time, the Ram Mandir movement gained momentum. Many political leaders and organisations played a crucial role in strengthening of the Ram Mandir movement in the late 1980s, including BJP leaders like Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti, Pramod Mahajan and groups such as VHP and the RSS. Advani became the political face of the movement.
LK Advani’s Rath Yatra that culminated in the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya
In 1990, Advani commenced a ‘Rath Yatra’ from the hallowed temple of Somnath in Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya to drum up support for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and to mobilise karsevaks and get them to assemble at the disputed sit. His aim was to educate people about the Ayodhya dispute and enlist their support for the construction of a Mandir at the former disputed site in Ayodhya that was awarded to Hindus by the Supreme Court of India in 2019.
The choice of Somnath was not accidental as Advani would later explain in his memoir ‘My Country My Life’: “The intention was to contextualise Ayodhya in the historical lineage of Muslim aggression and then to seek legitimacy for Mandir movement by drawing a parallel.”
LK Advani: The man who laid the building blocks of India’s political right
Advani’s Rath Yatra was abruptly halted and he was arrested by the Lalu Yadav government in Bihar in October 1990. Then the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in Uttar Pradesh ordered police to fire on Karsevaks to prevent them from reaching the Janmabhoomi site. As a result, the BJP withdrew support to the VP Singh govt and the govt fell in November 1990.
These incidents nevertheless galvanised Ram Bhakts and it culminated in the demolition of the disputed structure two years later. On 6th December 1992, protesting karsevaks, members of Hindu groups scaled the fencing of the mouldering building and razed the disputed construction to the ground.
Advani and other BJP leaders were accused of being provocateurs, of inciting people to bring the disputed structure down. However, after almost three decades of protracted legal battle, on 30th September 2020, the CBI’s special court acquitted Advani and released him from all charges. The court said the demolition was not pre-planned and that the accused were “trying to stop the mob and not incite them”.
Advani on his part has always maintained that it was never his intention to demolish the structure and all he sought was to revive civilisational pride in a great and ancient culture through the means of the Ram Temple movement.
Advani also played a key role in ushering the BJP into the era of dominance and shifting the Overton window to mainstream the politics of Hindutva. He called out the Congress party’s treachery by referring to its minority appeasement as “pseudo-secularism”. He is also to be credited for laying the foundation of India’s political right which has been furthered by PM Narendra Modi.
After the BJP-led NDA formed the government in 1998 under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Advani became the home minister, and later in 2002, he was made the Deputy Prime Minister. After BJP lost the elections in 2004, Vajpayee retired from active politics, and Advani became the tallest leader of the party. He was the Prime Ministerial candidate of the party in the 2009, however, BJP failed to defeat the Congress-led UPA, and the dream of Advani to become the prime minister of India was never fulfilled. He was the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2009, and earlier from 1990 to 1993.
LK Advani won the Lok Sabha elections from Gandhi for the fifth consecutive time in 2014. However, by now the Narendra Modi era in BJP had begun. Later Advani was part of the Marg Darshak Mandal of the BJP, along with Murli Manohar Joshi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee
