Modi on Advani's 99th birthday: he gave the BJP a foundation of Nation First

Prime Minister Narendra Modi marked the 99th birthday of L K Advani on Sunday with an article in leading newspapers, writing that the veteran leader “gave the Bharatiya Janata Party a clear foundation rooted in the principle of Nation First”. Advani, a former Deputy Prime Minister and one of the BJP’s founders, enters the hundredth year of his life.

Modi closed by praying that Advani be blessed with good health and continue to inspire everyone as he has always done. The tribute was reported by the public broadcaster at 2:04 pm IST.

What the article says

Modi described Advani’s ideological clarity and intellectual sharpness and said he challenged what Modi called pseudo-secularism. He also pointed to Advani’s simplicity and probity as marks of his public life.

On the party’s electoral rise, Modi credited Advani’s terms as BJP president with the Congress falling from 400 seats to below 200 in 1989, and with the BJP becoming the single largest party for the first time in 1996.

Modi also made a personal recollection. In the 1991 Lok Sabha elections Advani contested from two seats, one of them Gandhinagar in Gujarat. Modi wrote that he helped prepare the nomination papers and assisted with the campaign.

Home ministry and the Rath Yatra

Modi described Advani as one of the longest-serving home ministers of the country. In his account, Advani strengthened the security apparatus, improved the lives of security personnel and ensured the country got a tough anti-terror law. Advani held the home portfolio from 1998 and was Deputy Prime Minister from June 2002 to May 2004 in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.

The Prime Minister called the Somnath-to-Ayodhya Rath Yatra an iconic moment that changed Indian society for the better. Advani began the yatra at Somnath, Gujarat, on September 25, 1990, to build support for a Ram temple at Ayodhya. It was halted in Bihar in October that year, before it could reach Ayodhya.

Advani at a glance

• Born: November 8, 1927, in Karachi, then in undivided India.
• Party: a founder of the BJP in April 1980; party president three times, from 1986 to 1991, 1993 to 1998 and 2004 to 2005.
• Seats: the BJP went from 2 Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to 85 in 1989 and 161 in 1996, the rise Modi’s article credits to his leadership.
• Gandhinagar: he represented the seat for most of the period from 1991 to 2019, when Amit Shah was elected from it.
• 2009: he was the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in the Lok Sabha election that year.

How we got here

Advani was conferred the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest civilian honour, in 2024; the award was announced on February 3 of that year. Modi also greeted Advani on his birthday in 2024 and 2025. This year’s tribute took the form of a long written piece rather than a short greeting.

The article comes on a day Modi spent in a different setting. Earlier on Sunday he celebrated Diwali with security personnel in Bastar, which we reported in our own earlier story, and he had sent Diwali greetings to the country.

Why it matters

His account ties the present party, now in office at the Centre for more than a decade, to the strategy Advani set in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it restates the party’s founding claim that national interest comes first. The claims about seat numbers and about the opponents’ secularism are Modi’s own characterisation.

What next

The report mentioned no further birthday programme and no response from other parties or from Advani’s family at the time of writing. Advani’s next birthday, on November 8, 2027, will mark 100 years.