In last three decades of India’s electoral history they werethe strong voices of their party, states and respective constituencies in LokSabha but their voices will not be heard in the 17th Lok Sabha, which gave adecisive mandate to Narendra Modi government.
Prominent among them, who influenced the national politicsfor decades, are Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) veterans L.K. Advani, MurliManohar Joshi, Sumitra Mahajan, Hukumdev Narayan Yadav, former Prime MinisterH.D. Deve Gowda, former Congress leader in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge and hisdeputy Jyotiraditya Scindia.
The BJP veterans didn’t contest 2019 Lok Sabha polls as theywere denied tickets on age ground while Deve Gowda, Kharge and Scindia, whowere bitter critics of Modi, tasted defeats in their respective constituencies.
Advani, who was the oldest member in the outgoing Lok Sabhaat 91 years, has represented the Gandhinagar constituency since 1991 and hasbeen winning all the last five general elections by big margins.
If Advani had contested, he could have become the oldest MPever to fight the Lok Sabha elections after Ram Sunder Das of the JanataDal-United, who won from Hajipur in 2009 at age 88 and ended his stint at theage of 93.
Advani, remembered mostly for the rath yatra he undertook in1990 to press for the demolition of the Babri mosque and building a Ram templein its place, has served as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister.
His yatra, however, created the momentum that led to thedemolition and large-scale riots but also established the BJP as a majorpolitical force in the country.
Besides Advani, party veterans Joshi, Mahajan, Shanta Kumar,Kalraj Mishra and Bhagat Singh Koshyari also didn’t contest Lok Sabha polls.
Joshi, who won in 2014 from Kanpur, was the BJP Presidentbetween 1991 and 1993 and has also represented Allahabad and Varanasi inParliament. In 2014, he was shifted to Kanpur after the party decided to fieldNarendra Modi from Varanasi. He also held several posts in the Uniongovernment.
Advani and Joshi are considered three top leaders of the BJPafter late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who shaped the BJP which in 2019elections alone won 303 seats.
Sumitra Mahajan was elected the Speaker in the 16th LokSabha but she did not contest the general elections this time.
In 2014, she got elected to the Lower House for the eighthtime. She is currently the longest-serving woman member and has represented theIndore constituency of Madhya Pradesh since 1989.
As a Union Minister she held the portfolios for HumanResource Development, Communications and Petroleum.
Hukumdev Narayan Yadav, a five time Lok Sabha MP, was knownfor oratory skills in the Lower House. Yadav, a socialist leader who served ashead of panchayat, was elected as MLA and entered the Lok Sabha in 1977.
Since then, he has represented Madhubani parliamentaryconstituency but he chose not to contest this time.
Deve Gowda, the former Prime Minister and a strong voicefrom the state of Karnataka for the past three decades, couldn’t enterParliament for the first time.
He was expecting a sixth win in a row from Tumkur but wasdefeated by BJP’s G.S. Basavaraju.
Elected to Parliament from Hassan constituency in 1991,Gowda was instrumental in bringing the problems of Karnataka, especially offarmers, to the forefront.
Kharge, who was leader of the Congress party in the 16th LokSabha, had served as Union Cabinet Minister – Labour and Employment, Railwaysand Social Justice and Empowerment in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government.
He lost from Gulbarga parliamentary constituency inKarnataka by a margin of 95,452 votes against BJP’s Umesh G. Jadhav.
Scindia, the young face of Congress in the outgoing LokSabha, also tasted defeat for the first time in his electoral career.
A close associate of Congress President Rahul Gandhi,Scindia was defeated by BJP’s Krishna Pal Yadav from Guna parliamentaryconstituency of Madhya Pradesh.
Guna was earlier known as the family bastion of the Scindiafamily.
Another Congress leader, Tariq Anwar was also defeated inthe elections from his traditional Katihar seat in Bihar while Shiv Senaveteran Ananth Geete also failed to make it to the Lok Sabha. Mohammad Saleem,a prominent voice of the Communist Party of India-Marxist too lost his seat.
This change in the Lok Sabha indicates a generational shiftin Indian politics as out of the 542 newly-elected members, over 300 arefirst-timers while several heavyweights were defeated.