New Delhi: Former Prime Minister and founder of Bharathiya Janata Party, Atal Bihari Vajapayee is 89 on Dec.25, 2013, Wednesday, today. He has been in retirement for about decade since UPA and congress party in particular has taken over reins of power in New Delhi. The current Prime Minister for the last years or more since 2004 is Dr. Manmohan Singh.
BJP members in the Capital and admirers of Vajapayee in hundreds poured in at his residence next to the house of Jagjievan Ram former deputy PM, whose daughter Mira Kumar is the speaker of Lok Sabha at present.
It may be noted that Janatha Party (United) under JP Narayan had taken over central Govt. rule for 2 years when Indira Gandhi was discarded after 11 years of rule as PM and Bharathiya Jana Sangh formed a part of united Janata Party under Morarjee Desai as PM in 1979 after Emergency.
The JP broke in to several pieces later and BJP was formed by A B Vajapayee and L K Advani, who has retired now as a BJP leader. It was vajapayee who successfully steered the BJP from its initial stages of wreckage in power and formed NDA with 12 Parties and returned to power in 1999. Vajapayee transformed Indian national scene in 5 years, with national highways running through the entire country from north to south and east to west. He also took care to develop and protect agriculture and rural development works, while maintaining a policy of friendship with Pakistan by bus and train routes across the border on the west. He should have been a new Bharatha Ratna after his retirement and fall of BJP from power in 2004, but the Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, would not allow it. So he remained in a desolate area in the capital till now.
Since today is his birthday, the people of New Delhi, Delhi, Haryana, Panjab, UP and other states around where BJP is still in power will throng to greet him at his residence on his 89th Birthday, and wish him a long life for services rendered to Indian people at large as the founder of BJP controlled by RSS.
Vajapayee was an exhalent speaker in public drawing huge crowds wherever he went all over India as an orator and a Hindi poet. We wish him a happy Birthday of many returns in his advancing age.