A life spent at the forefront of one of independent India's most consequential religious campaigns deserves more than a passing mention — and on Sunday, 27 September 2026, Union Power Minister Manohar Lal Khattar ensured it got one, offering a formal tribute to the late Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) former president Ashok Singhal on his birth anniversary.

Khattar's post in Hindi read: 'Rashtra ke sanskritik gaurav ko punarsthaapit karne ke liye apna sampurna jeevan hom kar dene waale...' — offering 'countless salutations' to Singhal, whom he described as the 'flag-bearer of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi movement' and a dedicated servant of Indian culture and tradition. 'Your life, devoted to the preservation of Indian culture and traditions and the rejuvenation of the nation, will always guide us,' he wrote.

Who was Ashok Singhal?

Ashok Singhal, who passed away in 2015, was the longest-serving and most prominent leader of the Vishva Hindu Parishad — the Hindu cultural organisation founded in 1964. He became the defining face of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi movement, the decades-long campaign advocating the construction of a Ram temple at the contested site in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. His organisational drive through the 1980s and 1990s helped transform that campaign into a mass mobilisation that reshaped Indian politics.

The movement he championed ultimately concluded with the landmark Supreme Court verdict of 2019, which cleared the path for temple construction, and the subsequent consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya in January 2024 — an event Singhal did not live to witness.

Birthday tributes and the BJP's cultural memory

Khattar's tribute follows a consistent pattern among senior BJP leaders, who regularly mark the birth anniversaries of figures central to the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. For the party, Singhal occupies a distinct place — a non-electoral but foundational figure whose organisational work is credited with building the cultural and religious groundwork on which the party's mobilisation from the 1980s onward was built.

For Khattar — a senior Haryana leader and former Chief Minister who has built his political identity around cultural heritage themes — the tribute carries particular weight. It is a signal that the ideological lineage remains alive and honoured even as the temple itself stands complete.

The movement is over. The monument stands. But the men who built it are not forgotten — and in Indian political culture, birth anniversaries are the formal calendar of that memory.