The Ajit Doval Tilak Award ceremony in Pune on Saturday saw Union Home Minister Amit Shah confer the Lokmanya Tilak National Award 2026 on the National Security Advisor, honouring his role in India's internal and external security. The event was held on the 106th death anniversary of Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

Ajit Doval Tilak Award recognises decades of security work

Shah called Doval the principal architect of India's present national security and foreign policy. He said the NSA's counsel had shaped every major security decision taken under Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014.

"Whenever history is written, if anyone analyses internal security and external security, then clearly, for Ajit Doval ji, a golden page will have to be kept reserved; there is no doubt about this," Shah said. He tied Tilak's fearless nationalism to what he described as Doval's excellence in keeping the country strong and sovereign, and said honours of this kind are not ceremonial alone but a way for society to record its gratitude to those who give their lives to the nation.

The award was presented before an audience of state leaders and citizens in the city.

Shah recalls the Ahmedabad blasts inquiry

The Home Minister reached back to his years in Gujarat to show how long his working relationship with Doval runs. He recounted the aftermath of the 2008 Ahmedabad serial blasts, when the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi told the state police to seek Doval's help.

Shah said Doval's guidance allowed Gujarat Police to solve the Ahmedabad case and to move on several other bomb blast investigations across the country at the same time. He termed it an extraordinary result.

A foreign policy Shah called a backbone of steel

On the external front, Shah said India's foreign policy now carried what he called a backbone of steel, and that the country had strengthened its standing in the world alongside a renewed sense of self-respect. He credited Modi's decision to appoint Doval as one of his first acts on taking office in 2014, and placed that appointment at the start of a longer arc of choices he said had defined the years since.

Doval's return to a city from his childhood

Doval accepted the award with a personal recollection. He told the gathering he had lived in Pune as a small boy, around 76 years ago, when his father was posted there with the Army, that he had gone to school in the city, and that he had first heard of Tilak from a teacher.

"I could never have imagined that, 76 years later, I would return to the same city to receive an award instituted in his memory. It is truly my good fortune," he said.

He turned the rest of his remarks towards the young. Freedom, he argued, was not only the liberty to act as one wished but carried duties to society and to the nation. He asked every Indian, and the youth in particular, to weigh Tilak's words and the idea of nation-building he stood for, and to place the national interest ahead of personal ambition at what he called a rare moment for building the country.

The Tilak award and its past recipients

The Ajit Doval Tilak Award continues a line of honours the Lokmanya Tilak Smarak Trust began in 1983. The award is conferred each year on 1 August, Tilak's death anniversary, on people judged to have contributed to the nation's progress.

Past recipients include Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with former Presidents and Prime Ministers among them Pranab Mukherjee, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Indira Gandhi. The Trust cited Doval's work in counter-terrorism, strategic intelligence, border security and defence policy when it named him for the 2026 honour.

Doval, 81, has been National Security Advisor since May 2014 and is the longest-serving holder of the post. A 1968-batch officer of the Indian Police Service, he handled assignments in Mizoram, Sikkim, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, served in Indian missions in Islamabad and London, and was associated with the 2016 surgical strikes, the Balakot air strike, and the resolution of the Doklam standoff. He has also served as India's Special Representative for the boundary talks with China.

In that role he has been India's face across a run of security dialogues over the past year. He hosted the BRICS national security advisers in New Delhi in June and chaired the BIMSTEC security chiefs in July, and has run sensitive neighbourhood diplomacy, including the groundwork around the Myanmar President's visit to New Delhi.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde attended, with Trust president Dr Rohit Tilak and other ministers and leaders present. Shah said the recognition would reach past the ceremony itself, telling the gathering it would act as a source of inspiration for citizens who work for the country in any field, and he ended his address on Tilak's proclamation that Swaraj was a birthright.