A man who spent decades fighting for a single cause — the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya — was remembered on Sunday, 27 September 2026, as Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan offered tribute to Ashok Singhal, the late former international president of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), on his birth anniversary.

Posting in Hindi on X, Chouhan saluted Singhal as 'Ram Janmabhoomi aandolan ke praneta' — the 'pioneer of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement' — and invoked his legacy in the service of the motherland and the protection of dharma. 'You will be remembered across ages for your unparalleled works and efforts in the service of the motherland and the protection of dharma,' he wrote, adding, 'Salutations at the feet of a true sentinel of religion and nation.'

Singhal's six-decade campaign and the movement he shaped

Ashok Singhal was the defining face of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement for much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. As international president of the Vishva Hindu Parishad — the Sangh Parivar organisation founded in 1964 — he channelled decades of grassroots Hindu mobilisation into one of independent India's most consequential political-religious campaigns.

The agitation Singhal championed reshaped national electoral arithmetic, catalysed communal fault lines, and ultimately produced the 2019 Supreme Court verdict that cleared the way for the temple's construction at Ayodhya. The Ram Mandir's consecration — completed after his death — is widely seen as the political and civilisational culmination of everything he worked toward.

BJP's ideological thread runs through every tribute

Chouhan's post is part of a consistent pattern among senior BJP leaders: marking anniversaries tied to the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation with public tributes that simultaneously honour a historical figure and reaffirm the party's own ideological lineage. For the BJP, Singhal is not merely a VHP leader — he is a link in the chain that runs from the Sangh Parivar's founding generation to the temple's inauguration.

As a four-term Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh and a senior figure in the RSS-affiliated ecosystem, Chouhan has long occupied the intersection of governance and cultural nationalism that defines the BJP's identity in the Hindi belt. A tribute like this one costs no political capital — and spends some, reinforcing credibility with a core constituency.

The memory of Ashok Singhal is not fading; if anything, the completed temple at Ayodhya has given it fresh architecture. Every birth anniversary now lands in the shadow of an achievement he spent his life pursuing.