(BJP) Modern Indian political party with
a strong Hindu nationalist (Hindutva)
orientation. The party was formed as the
political wing of the Hindu nationalist
organization known as Rashtriya
Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and many of
the BJP’s leaders have been RSS members
for decades. The BJP was formed in 1980
after the dissolution of its predecessor
organization, the Jana Sangh. The latter
was an RSS affiliate as well, several of the
whose leaders, notably Lal Krishna
Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, have
also led the BJP. At first the BJP took a
moderate political stance and fared
quite poorly, winning only two seats in
the 1984 elections. In the later 1980s it
took a far more militant tone, stressing
as its focal issue the campaign to build
the Ram Janam Bhumi temple in
Ayodhya. As the Indian electorate grew
more religiously polarized, the BJP
climbed to eighty-six seats in 1989 and
120 seats in 1991. In the 1996 elections it
won 160 seats, becoming the largest single party in India’s 535-seat Parliament.
104
Bharati Dashanami
The president of India invited the BJP to
form a government, but this failed when
it was unable to gain enough support
from other parties to muster a majority
of votes in Parliament.
The BJP’s traditional constituency has
been brahmins and members of the
trading communities, both of whom
tend to be religiously conservative and
supportive of the Hindutva message. In
the mid-1990s the BJP muted its Hindu
nationalist rhetoric in an attempt to
reach beyond these traditional constituencies and to gain more widespread
support by moving closer to the political
center. Despite these changes, many of
the established secular parties still view
the BJP with suspicion and have refused
to ally themselves with the organization.
The BJP’s inability to mobilize such support among the larger body politic was a
major factor behind the collapse of its
short-lived government in 1996. The
country was then run by a coalition of
thirteen secular political parties, whose
single binding commitment is their
opposition to the BJP. However, since
1998 the BJP has succeeded in building
coalitions to form a government. For
further information see Walter K.
Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The
Brotherhood in Saffron, 1987; and
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu
Nationalist Movement in India, 1996.