On 27 September 2026, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an RSS inspired organisation founded, began a year of programmes marking the birth centenary of Ashok Singhal. He was the leading figure in the movement that led to the restoration of temple at Ayodhya, the birthplace of Shri Ram, the Hindu deity revered by hundreds of millions of people.
Singhal died in November 2015, a decade before the Dharma Dhwaj, the sacred saffron flag, was hoisted atop the completed temple. In his centenary tribute, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recalled “the defining image of an injured and bleeding Ashok Ji at the peak of the movement”. He wrote that the grand temple stands today because of stalwarts like him.
The Engineer Who Became a Pracharak
Singhal was born in Agra on 27 September 1926 and grew up in Prayagraj. He joined the Sangh there in 1942 and graduated in metallurgical engineering from IIT (BHU), Varanasi, in 1950. That year, against his father’s wishes, he became a full-time pracharak(organiser) for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS), remaining unmarried and unsalaried.
Over the next 25 years he worked across Uttar Pradesh. He was jailed during the Emergency, the period from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and imprisoned thousands of opponents, the Sangh’s volunteers among them. He later became Prant Pracharak (Provincial Organiser) for the RSS’ Delhi and Haryana units, as documented in accounts based on VHP archives. Singhal was also a trained Hindustani classical vocalist and a disciple of Pandit Omkarnath Thakur.
Architect of the Movement
The turn came in February 1981. Some 180 marginalised families in Meenakshipuram, Tamil Nadu, embraced Islam. Singhal answered with mass Hindu sammelans (gatherings) and was soon deputed to the VHP. He set about turning it from a socio-cultural body into a mass organisation, beginning with the Ekatmata Yatra (the “unity pilgrimage”) of 1983.
On 7 and 8 April 1984, the VHP convened the first Dharma Sansad, a “parliament” of Hindu saints, at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi, with Singhal among its key organisers. The sants (seers) called for the liberation of the Janmasthan (birthplace). They formed the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Mukti Yagna Samiti under Mahant Avaidyanath of the Gorakhnath Math, a major monastic seat.
This became Singhal’s method: the saints led in public, the VHP organised, and he held the sampradayas together. The Ram-Janaki Rath Yatra from Sitamarhi carried the demand to open the locks at birth place of Sri Rama to the villages. On 1 February 1986 the Faizabad District Judge (Faizabad is now Ayodhya) ordered them removed.
The 1989 worship of bricks inscribed with Sri Ram’s name (Ram Shila Pujan) was one of the defining phases of Singhal’s leadership. The bricks were ritually worshipped in villages across India and abroad before being carried to Ayodhya. At the foundation-stone-laying ceremony on 9 November 1989, the first brick was laid by Kameshwar Chaupal, a VHP volunteer from a Scheduled Caste family in Bihar. Scheduled Castes are the communities once subjected to untouchability and now protected under India’s constitution. Modi attributes this choice to Singhal himself.
The Confrontation of 1990
For the devotees who converged on Ayodhya, 30 October 1990, Devuthani Ekadashi, a sacred day in the Hindu calendar, was a pilgrimage. Mulayam Singh Yadav, then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, had declared that not even a bird would be able to enter the town. Trains and buses were stopped, and some 28,000 police and paramilitary personnel manned five cordons around it. Around a lakh (100,000) of karsevaks, volunteers who come to perform service for the cause, entered regardless.
Singhal had slipped in secretly two days earlier. When the cordon broke and the lathis (police batons) came down, he was struck on the head and went on leading with blood running down his face.
What the devotees remember most is their own restraint. Most answered the lathis by chanting Shri Ram’s name. Two young karsevaks shielded an elderly devotee with their bodies and took the blows without raising a hand. Karsevaks climbed the domes of the structure and raised a saffron flag before a shot cleared them. Later that day the police fired near the Saryu bridge (the Saryu is the holy river of Ayodhya) and at Hanumangarhi, a major temple.
On 2 November the firing came again, much of it at close range. Among the dead were Ram and Sharad Kothari of Kolkata, aged 23 and 20. Official figures put the toll for those days at between 15 and 26. The VHP said it cremated 70 bodies.
The firing did not break the movement. The Shri Ram Karseva Samiti answered with a mass satyagraha (non-violent civil resistance) in which lakhs of men and women took part.
In December 1990 the Chandra Shekhar government brought the VHP and the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee to the table. The VHP placed written submissions before it covering the literary, historical, revenue, judicial and archaeological record. According to the VHP’s booklet on Shri Rama Janmabhoomi, the government’s own minutes noted that the Committee did not answer this evidence point by point. It only submitted photocopies of further material, leaving officials unable to say where the two sides agreed or differed. The Committee soon withdrew from the talks.
In its 1991 resolution on the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi, the Sangh’s Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha, its highest representative body, recorded that the VHP had “furnished unassailable historical, literary and archaeological evidences” which its opponents could not refute. It called on Hindu society to “march ahead ceaselessly without pause or rest till the final goal is achieved.”
Demolition, Verdict and Victory
On 6 December 1992 the disputed structure was brought down. A stone inscription recovered from its walls was read by epigraphists as recording a twelfth-century temple to Vishnu-Hari.
The Liberhan Commission later named Singhal among those responsible. In September 2020, however, a special CBI (India’s federal investigating agency) court acquitted all the accused. It held that the demolition was not pre-planned and that Singhal had tried to stop the karsevaks because the idols of Ram Lalla, the infant Shri Ram, were inside.
Singhal kept the cause alive through the years of litigation, fasting for the temple even under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, which was led by a fellow Sangh-rooted prime minister..
On 9 November 2019, thirty years to the day after Chaupal laid that brick, the Supreme Court unanimously awarded the site to Ram Lalla Virajman. Under Indian law the deity is a juristic person who can hold property and sue.
(The writer is an author and columnist)
