A century in the making — and Prime Minister Narendra Modi marked the milestone with a rare, deeply personal tribute. On Sunday, 8 November 2026, as veteran BJP patriarch Lal Krishna Advani stepped into his hundredth year, Modi published a full-length article recounting the arc of a life that helped shape modern Indian politics from the ground up.

From Partition's shadow to the foundations of the BJP

Modi's tribute opens where Advani's story begins — with the trauma of Partition in 1947, which forced a young Advani to leave Karachi and rebuild his life from nothing on the Indian side of a newly drawn border. That formative rupture, Modi writes, forged the steel in a man who would go on to become one of independent India's most consequential political organisers. Advani joined the Jana Sangh, the party founded in 1951 that would later evolve into the Bharatiya Janata Party, and spent decades in its organisational machinery before helping establish the BJP in 1980 after the collapse of the Janata Party coalition.

The Emergency, the Rath Yatra, and a party's national rise

Two episodes define Advani's political legend above all others. The first: when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended democratic rights during the Emergency of 1975–77, Advani was among those detained for defying the regime — a stand that cemented his credentials as a democrat willing to pay a personal price. The second: in 1990, Advani launched the Somnath-to-Ayodhya Rath Yatra, a cross-country campaign that electrified the Ram temple movement and vaulted the BJP from a marginal force into a national one. The yatra's legacy remains one of the most debated — and consequential — episodes in post-Independence electoral history.

Deputy PM, voracious reader, cinema lover

Beyond the agitations, Advani served as Home Minister from 1998 to 2004 and as Deputy Prime Minister from 2002 to 2004 in the Vajpayee-led NDA government, steering internal security at a period of acute geopolitical stress. Modi's article, he says, also explores the less-reported dimensions of Advani — his voracious reading habit, a lifelong love of Indian culture and cinema, and a prolific output as a writer. It is a portrait of a man whose influence stretched well beyond the rally ground.

Modi's pattern of saluting the Jana Sangh generation

This tribute is not an isolated gesture. Modi has periodically issued public homages to the pre-1990 BJP architects, using each occasion to draw an explicit ideological line from the Jana Sangh era through the Emergency resistance and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to the party's current dominance. Advani's centenary year — beginning today — gives that narrative its most resonant chapter yet. The full article is available in both English and Hindi via links shared by the Prime Minister.

Advani turns 100 years old in 2027; today marks the first day of that centenary year — a distinction Modi underscores by calling 8 November a 'landmark day.' Whether the party organises formal centenary events over the coming year will be the next thing to watch.