75 is just a number: Modi's birthday and BJP's flexi-retirement policy

Earlier this month, a BJP parliamentarian received a call he thought was rather “awkward”. On the other end of the line was a nonagenarian BJP leader – a former BJP president, multiple-term MP and Union minister – who has now spent over a decade in political oblivion, albeit in the comfort of his Lutyen’s Delhi bungalow.

The party veteran, who also has the reputation of being a voracious reader, had just finished reading RJD MP Manoj Kumar Jha’s recently released book, In Praise of Coalition Politics, and, perhaps, wanted to share his impressions.

What perplexed the BJP parliamentarian was his party senior's repeated stress on India’s need for a “real return” to the coalition era and his keen observation that the checks and balances inherent in coalition politics prevent prime ministers, or any other satrap, from running his party or government purely on their whims.
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The conversation ended as abruptly as it had begun. There was no discussion on whether the nonagenarian leader’s lamentations were linked to anyone in particular.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned 75 on September 17, the BJP decided it was a historic moment that the country must celebrate. The morning newspapers turned into voluminous tributes to Modi, BJP leaders of all hues dutifully shared “My Modi Story” on their social media handles highlighting the many virtues of their supreme leader, and many a public space across the country turned into celebratory venues.

The “birthday boy”, of course, works nearly 20 hours a day without a break, come rain or shine, so he didn’t let the celebrations become a distraction.

Ordinary citizens receive presents on their birthday, but Modi, by his own humble admission, is no ordinary man. So there he was in Madhya Pradesh’s Dhar district, unveiling yet another “welfare scheme” – the Swasth Nari Shakti Parivar Abhiyan; giving away yet another saugat (gift) to women while simultaneously reminding everyone else that India was safe and secure under his leadership.

Congratulatory messages, of course, kept pouring in from all sections of society. None less than billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani even wished that the 75-year-old Modi would “continue to serve India” till 2047, when independent India turns 100 and the Prime Minister 97.

For many in the BJP who are about the same age as Modi, the fervent appeals that Modi must continue in office must be reassuring. For the past 11 years, turning 75 had become like reaching the Rubicon of their political careers; crossing it meant an irrevocable end to their journey in public life if they wished to continue in the party, no matter how illustrious their past may have been.

With Modi showing no inclination to accept the retirement age he had unofficially set for others in his party, and his party apparatchiks cleverly changing the narrative now to emphasise that India needs Modi for at least another term as PM, if not all the way till 2047, his contemporaries in the party can breathe easy.

The nonagenarian leader would have hoped he was at least 16 years younger, for that would have possibly saved him from forced retirement and the ignominy of calling up serving party MPs to extol the virtues of coalition politics. For him the only solace now, if it can be called so, is that he isn’t lonely in that cartel of forcibly-retired stalwarts.

Modi’s rise as PM and the imposition of 75 years as the unofficial age at which BJP leaders must hang their boots has had its fair share of martyrs, each with varying electoral heft but all of significant political stature, both within and beyond the BJP.

Even before Modi ascended the humble chair of India’s Pradhan Sevak in 2014, it was clear that the BJP’s original Rath Yatri, Lal Krishna Advani, would never have the reins of the party’s chariot again. Advani may have nursed prime ministerial ambitions ever since Atal Behari Vajpayee made a quiet exit from public life following his government’s surprise defeat in the 2004 polls, but his own attempts at bringing the BJP back to power as the NDA’s PM face in 2009 had failed miserably.

By 2014, when the ground was ripe for a BJP sweep at the hustings owing to the scandalous tenure of UPA-II, his one-time protégé Modi had outmanoeuvred Advani to have himself be declared the party’s PM candidate before the polls.

His prime ministerial ambitions usurped by protégé Modi, Advani, then 85, had to make his peace staying on as a mere Lok Sabha MP from Gujarat’s Gandhinagar, but the slight was, perhaps, too much to bear, and his appearance in Lok Sabha reduced drastically during his final term.

By 2019, relegated to the party’s Margdarshak Mandal (Guidance Panel), along with Murli Manohar Joshi and Yashwant Sinha, Advani was edged out completely. His constituency of Gandhinagar also passed on to Modi’s closest confidante and then-BJP president Amit Shah.

For the past six years, Advani, now 97, has led a quiet life away from the political spotlight he so loved and desired; the silence of his reflections broken occasionally – usually November 8, his birthday, when Modi comes visiting, with cameras and some leaders in tow.

Unlike Advani, former Union minister Yashwant Sinha did not take his forced retirement lying down. For nearly five years after being packed off to the Margdarshak Mandal, Sinha critiqued Modi’s governance at every chance he got even though his elder son, Jayant Sinha, was a minister in the Union council.

When the protestations went unheeded, he walked out of the party, guns still blazing. After a brief and uneventful stint with Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, Sinha sought to reassert his relevance in 2022 but cut a sorry figure when he went up against the NDA’s Presidential poll candidate Droupadi Murmu as the ‘united’ Opposition’s joint candidate and logged a massive, though pre-ordained, defeat.

Two years later, in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP went a step further to rub in the insult by benching Jayant Sinha as the party nominee from the Sinhas’ family borough of Hazaribagh in Jharkhand even though the prodigal son had, as a faithful BJP member, publicly criticised his father’s attacks on the Modi regime.

Murli Manohar Joshi, a former BJP president and the man who became synonymous with the party’s still-unfolding project of “saffronising” India’s education during his six-year stint as Union HRD minister from 1998 to 2004, also chose the Advani route of silent acquiescence when Modi made it clear in 2014 that the time for a generational change in the party had come.

Like Advani, Joshi too continued as an ordinary party MP in the Lok Sabha till 2019, making increasingly fewer appearances in Parliament as the years went by, before opting out of the 2024 contest “as per the wishes of the party”.

The only notable exception, who continued to enjoy electoral and ministerial space at least for a time, even after turning 75, was former Union minister Kalraj Mishra. Mishra, an important Brahmin leader from Uttar Pradesh, was already the oldest member of Modi’s first cabinet when he was given the cabinet charge of the MSME ministry at the age of 73 in 2014.

However, the BJP’s careful effort not to offend the UP’s Brahmin voters during the February 2017 polls (the BJP won its first-ever absolute majority in the state in that election) allowed him to stay on as a minister in the Union cabinet till September 2017.

His exit from the Union cabinet too wasn’t unceremonious as Mishra was first sent off as Governor to Himachal Pradesh in 2019 for a brief stint and then shifted to Rajasthan before being eased out of office last July.

Few in the BJP’s club of “75+” have, however, had the same luck as Mishra. Stalwarts like Shanta Kumar and BC Khanduri, former chief ministers of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, respectively, saw their political careers come to a screeching halt in Modi’s era as did former Uttarakhand CM Bhagat Singh Koshyari, who, however, did manage to get a gubernatorial assignment in Maharashtra after being eased out of electoral politics.

Former Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan too had to quietly walk into the sunset in 2019. The garrulous Subramanian Swamy suffered the same fate but has, unlike Yashwant Sinha, chosen to remain within the BJP and continue his often-vitriolic broadsides against Modi, though no one in his party finds it worthy to engage with him or respond to his criticisms.

With the exception of Joshi and Mishra, it is not surprising that none of these leaders have publicly wished Modi on his personal milestone yet. The 75-year-old Modi, perhaps, would understand their indisposition.

For others in the BJP yet to reach 75, there is now hope.