A century after his birth, Ashok Singhal — the man who gave the Ram Janmabhoomi movement its organisational spine — is being remembered at the highest levels of Indian public life. Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai shared on Sunday, 27 September 2026, a tribute delivered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his Mann Ki Baat radio address, honouring Singhal on his 100th birth anniversary.

What PM Modi Said — and Why CM Sai Amplified It

In the Mann Ki Baat address, PM Modi described Singhal as someone who 'apna poora jeevan samarpita kar diya tha' — 'dedicated his entire life' — to culture, society, and the nation. Modi directly credited Singhal's leadership of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) for shaping the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, saying the grand Ram temple now visible in Ayodhya is the direct result of the direction and energy Singhal gave to that campaign.

CM Sai's decision to carry these remarks to his own platform signals how far Singhal's legacy resonates across BJP-governed states. The tribute was not incidental — it placed the Ayodhya temple, inaugurated on 22 January 2024, as a living monument to Singhal's decades of work.

Singhal's Role in the Ram Janmabhoomi Decades

Ashok Singhal served as the international working president of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the Hindu nationalist organisation founded in 1964 that drove temple-related mobilisation across India from the 1980s onward. Under his stewardship, the VHP transformed the Ayodhya cause from a local religious dispute into a mass movement that would consume Indian politics for the better part of three decades.

The legal arc he helped set in motion ended with the Supreme Court of India's November 2019 verdict, which cleared the way for temple construction at the disputed site. Singhal did not live to see that ruling — he passed away in 2015 — yet the Modi government's inauguration of the temple is now routinely framed as the fulfilment of his life's mission.

Ayodhya Temple as the Measure of a Movement

For the BJP and allied organisations, the Ram temple at Ayodhya is not merely a religious structure — it is the visible proof of a decades-long political and cultural promise kept. Tributes to figures like Singhal on milestone anniversaries reinforce that narrative, connecting the post-2014 political era directly to the grassroots mobilisation of the 1980s and 1990s.

CM Sai's amplification of this tribute from Raipur shows how state leaders are actively weaving the Ayodhya story into regional political discourse — keeping the momentum of the January 2024 consecration alive as a unifying symbol well into the mid-2020s.

A century on, Singhal's name is being invoked not in archives but in prime-time radio addresses and viral social posts — the movement he built has found its monument, and his centenary is the occasion to say so out loud.