Bharatiya Janata Party
The Bharatiya Janata Party, whose name means Indian People's Party, won exactly two seats in India's Lok Sabha in the general election of 1984. One winner, A. K. Patel, came from Mehsana in Gujarat. The other, C. Janga Reddy, came from Hanamkonda in Andhra Pradesh.
As of March 2026, that same party is the biggest in the country by representation, in both the national parliament and the state legislatures. The alliance it leads, the National Democratic Alliance, governed 20 Indian states and 2 union territories as of May 2026. Narendra Modi has been prime minister since 2014.
How does a party that small become the dominant force in the world's most populous democracy? Who built it, and what organisations stand behind it? What does it believe, and what do its critics say its rise has cost India? The answers begin with a flower, a colour, and a movement older than the party itself.
The lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, is the flower printed on the party's flag, and its founders picked it deliberately. In Hinduism the lotus is read as a sign of peace and prosperity. During the independence movement, Indian nationalists also used it as an emblem of revolt against the British Raj.
The lotus is India's national flower as well. That gives the symbol a nationalist ring and a Hindutva appeal at the same time, a pairing the party has never had to explain out loud.
Saffron does similar work. The party's most common flag is mostly saffron, with a green stripe on the left and the lotus set inside the saffron field. Saffron carries deep significance in Hinduism, and it dominates the party's promotional materials and campaigning.
The mix of saffron and green helps the party present itself as secular. The same palette keeps a religious undertone for its core electorate and for supporters of Hindutva. One flag, in other words, is built to be read two ways.
The name and the symbol were chosen by the founders, who were drawing on a movement far older than the party's name.
In 1951 a politician named Shyama Prasad Mukherjee left the Hindu Mahasabha and founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. He built it in collaboration with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, known as the RSS, and the Jana Sangh was widely seen as its political arm. The RSS lent the new party several full-time workers called pracharaks, including Deendayal Upadhyaya, who became general secretary.
Its aims were to protect what it called India's Hindu cultural identity. It also opposed what it saw as appeasement of Muslims and of Pakistan by the Congress party under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In the first general election, in 1952, it won only three Lok Sabha seats.
In May 1953 Mukherjee was arrested for entering Kashmir in defiance of an order from the state government. He had been campaigning for Kashmir's complete integration into India. He died of a heart attack in jail the following month.
His successor, Mauli Chandra Sharma, was pushed out by RSS activists inside the party, and leadership passed to Upadhyaya. Upadhyaya spent years building a committed grassroots organisation modelled on the RSS, and he put little energy into public engagement. By 1968 Atal Bihari Vajpayee had succeeded him as president, with Lal Krishna Advani also rising in the leadership.
The 1967 assembly elections gave the party its first taste of office. It joined coalitions with the Swatantra Party and the socialists, and it helped form state governments in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Sharing power meant shelving its more radical agenda.
Then came 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of emergency. Thousands of Jana Sangh members were jailed during the protests. When the Emergency was withdrawn in 1977, the Jana Sangh merged with the Socialist Party, the Congress (O) and the Bharatiya Lok Dal to form the Janata Party. Its main goal was to defeat Indira Gandhi.
The Janata Party won a majority and Morarji Desai became prime minister. The old Jana Sangh brought the biggest bloc, 93 seats, which was 31 percent of the party's strength. Vajpayee became Minister of External Affairs.
The marriage did not hold. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot called the assimilation of the Jana Sangh impossible. Its state and local units stayed tied to the RSS, and Hindu-Muslim violence rose during the Janata years, with former Jana Sangh members implicated in riots at Aligarh and Jamshedpur in 1978-79.
Other Janata leaders demanded that ex-Jana Sangh members cut their RSS ties, and they refused. A splinter group broke away, Desai resigned, and the 1980 election left the Janata Party with just 31 seats. In April 1980 its executive banned dual membership of the party and the RSS. The former Jana Sangh members walked out and founded the party now known as the BJP, with Vajpayee as its first president.
Vajpayee chose a softer line at first, playing down Hindutva and stressing Gandhian socialism. Whether that gamble could work was about to be tested.
Within months of Vajpayee's softer strategy facing voters, the assassination of Indira Gandhi helped Congress win a record 414 seats. The moderate approach had not worked, and the party turned toward harder Hindutva. Advani was appointed president in 1984, and under him the BJP became the political voice of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
The Vishva Hindu Parishad, or VHP, had begun a campaign in the early 1980s for a temple to the deity Rama at the site of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. The Mughal Emperor Babur had built the mosque in 1527. The campaign rested on a belief that the site was Rama's birthplace and that a temple had been demolished to make way for the mosque. Whether a temple once stood there is disputed.
The BJP made the campaign part of its election platform. In 1989 it won 86 Lok Sabha seats, enough to make its support crucial to V. P. Singh's National Front government.
In September 1990 Advani set out on a Rath Yatra, a chariot journey toward Ayodhya. Historian Ramachandra Guha described its imagery as "religious, allusive, militant, masculine, and anti-Muslim". Bihar's chief minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav, ordered Advani placed in preventive detention.
Still, a large number of kar sevaks, or religious volunteers, reached Ayodhya, and some attacked the mosque. Three days of fighting with paramilitary forces left several of them dead. The VHP urged Hindus to take revenge, and riots against Muslims followed across Uttar Pradesh.
The BJP withdrew its support from the Singh government, which forced fresh elections. The party rose to 120 seats and won a majority in the Uttar Pradesh assembly.
On the 6th of December 1992, the RSS and its affiliates organised a rally of more than 100,000 VHP and BJP activists at the mosque. It turned into a frenzied attack that ended with the mosque's demolition. Waves of Hindu-Muslim violence followed across the country over the next weeks, killing over 2,000 people.
The government briefly banned the VHP, and several BJP leaders, Advani among them, were arrested for inflammatory speeches. Several historians have argued that the demolition was the product of a conspiracy by the Sangh Parivar rather than a spontaneous act.
A 2009 report by Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan held 68 people responsible, mostly BJP leaders. It named Vajpayee, Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. It also criticised Kalyan Singh, Uttar Pradesh's chief minister at the time, for placing officials who would stay silent. In 2020 the Supreme Court of India acquitted every accused person, including Advani and Joshi.
The dispute itself ended in a different court ruling. After the Supreme Court verdict of 2019, the government announced a trust to build the temple. On the 22nd of January 2024 the Ram Mandir was formally opened, with Modi leading the consecration and calling it the start of a new era.
In the 1996 elections the BJP won 161 seats, making it the largest party in parliament for the first time. It had gained from the communal polarisation that followed the demolition. Vajpayee was sworn in as prime minister, but he could not assemble a majority, and the government resigned after 13 days.
A coalition of regional parties took over, but it was short-lived. For the 1998 mid-term polls, the BJP led a new grouping, the National Democratic Alliance. It included the Samata Party, the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Shiv Sena, the AIADMK and the Biju Janata Dal.
Only the Shiv Sena shared much of the BJP's ideology. Amartya Sen, for one, called the coalition an "ad hoc" grouping. With outside support from the Telugu Desam Party, Vajpayee returned as prime minister.
In May 1999 the AIADMK leader, J. Jayalalithaa, withdrew her support, and new elections were called. On the 13th of October 1999, the alliance won 303 seats, an outright majority even without the AIADMK. The BJP itself reached its highest-ever tally, 183 seats.
Vajpayee became prime minister for the third time, with Advani as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister. This government served its full five-year term. A scandal still marked it. In 2001 the BJP president Bangaru Laxman was filmed taking a bribe in a sting operation, was forced to resign, and was later sentenced to four years in prison.
Vajpayee called early elections in 2004, six months ahead of schedule. The campaign slogan was "India Shining", meant to portray a country in rapid economic transformation. The result was a shock. The alliance won only 186 seats against 222 for the Congress and its allies, and Manmohan Singh became prime minister.
Explanations for the defeat pointed to a failure to reach rural Indians and to a divisive agenda. For the next ten years the BJP served as the principal opposition party.
In May 2008 it won the Karnataka state elections, the first time it had taken an assembly election in any South Indian state. The 2009 general election cut its Lok Sabha strength to 116 seats and was Advani's last as leader. Arun Jaitley led the party in the Rajya Sabha and Sushma Swaraj in the Lok Sabha. Karnataka slipped away again in 2013, and the party's next national leader was already running Gujarat.
On the 27th of February 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims was burned outside the town of Godhra, and 59 people died. Massive anti-Muslim violence then swept Gujarat for several weeks. Estimates of the dead run as high as 2000, and 150,000 people were displaced.
Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, and several senior officials were accused of initiating or condoning the violence. Police officers were accused of directing rioters and handing them lists of Muslim-owned properties. Scholars including Paul Brass, Martha Nussbaum and Dipankar Gupta have said the state was highly complicit.
A Special Investigation Team, appointed by the Supreme Court in April 2009, cleared Modi of complicity in 2012. That caused anger and disbelief among many Muslim communities. Maya Kodnani, a BJP legislator who later held a cabinet post in Modi's government, was convicted of orchestrating one of the riots and sentenced to 28 years. The Gujarat High Court later acquitted her.
In the 2014 general election the BJP won 282 seats and the alliance reached 336 of the 543 in the Lok Sabha. Modi was sworn in as the 14th prime minister on the 26th of May 2014. The BJP's vote share was only 31 percent, low for a win of that size, and most opinion and exit polls had not foreseen the scale of it.
Analysts credited Modi's popularity and the Congress party's corruption scandals. The BJP also widened its traditionally upper-caste, upper-class base, drawing significant support from the middle class, Dalits and other Backward classes. Only 8 percent of Muslim voters backed it.
Afterward, the party became more centralised around Modi. Amit Shah, a close confidant, became party president in 2014. Veteran leaders such as Advani, Joshi and Jaswant Singh were, by many accounts, sidelined.
The BJP won again in 2019 with a bigger majority. On the 5th of August 2019, the government revoked the special status that Article 370 of the constitution had given Jammu and Kashmir. It also ended the region's statehood and split it into two union territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act passed parliament on the 11th of December 2019. It opened a path to citizenship for people of six named religions who had fled persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before December 2014. Muslims were not included. It was the first time Indian law had openly used religion as a criterion for citizenship, and it drew global criticism.
Widespread protests followed, and the COVID-19 pandemic halted them. Counter-demonstrations then grew into the 2020 Delhi riots, caused chiefly by Hindu mobs attacking Muslims. Of the 53 people killed, two-thirds were Muslim.
The V-Dem Institute described India as experiencing democratic backsliding in the Modi era, and other studies and media have said the same. Source commentary calls it the most notable challenge to Indian democracy since the Emergency of 1975-77. In 2024 Modi was re-elected, this time leading a coalition rather than winning a sole majority.
In the 1980s the BJP followed the RSS in championing swadeshi, the promotion of indigenous industries, along with a protectionist export policy. Even then it backed economic liberalisation at home and opposed the state-led industrialisation favoured by Congress. By the 1996 elections it had shifted away from protectionism and toward globalisation.
The NDA governments of 1998-2004 pursued deregulation, privatisation of state-owned enterprises and tariff cuts. These reforms built on the liberalisation begun by the Congress government of P. V. Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s. Growth in India's GDP rose substantially, and foreign companies poured in. The RSS and the Swadeshi Jagran Manch complained that the party was abandoning swadeshi.
Gujarat became the model. The BJP held power there for 16 years, and Modi's government ran the state from 2002 to 2014 on a strongly neoliberal agenda. It privatised infrastructure and services and rolled back labour and environmental rules. Business praised it, while critics said it served the upper-class constituency rather than the poor.
As prime minister, Modi opened defence and the railways to more foreign investment. Proposals to make it harder to form unions and easier to fire workers were partly dropped after protests. On the 2nd of September 2015, eleven of the country's largest unions went on strike, including one affiliated with the BJP, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh.
During his second term the government turned more protectionist. It withdrew from talks on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and launched the 2020 Atmanirbhar Bharat plan, which stresses national self-sufficiency.
On defence, the BJP has taken a more aggressive line than Congress. In 1998 Vajpayee's government carried out Pokhran-II, a series of five nuclear tests, soon after Pakistan tested a medium-range ballistic missile. In the same year he visited Pakistan and inaugurated the Delhi-Lahore bus service, then signed the Lahore Declaration.
A few months later Pakistani soldiers and militants were found occupying territory in Kashmir, which led to the 1999 Kargil War. India expelled them within about two months, and the Line of Control did not change. The government was criticised for the intelligence failure but not for the result. BJP cadres called Vajpayee weak for continuing to talk with Pakistan, and they helped block a deal at the Agra summit.
After the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, the NDA passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. When the bill failed in the Rajya Sabha, the government called a joint session of parliament to push it through. The law was used to prosecute hundreds of people. The National Human Rights Commission said it had been used to target Muslims, and the Congress-led government repealed it in 2004.
Modi's government has carried out strikes across borders on counterterrorism grounds. These include an operation in Myanmar in 2015, a Line of Control strike in 2016 and the Balakot airstrike in 2019. India also intervened militarily to defend Bhutan during the 2017 Doklam standoff with China. In August 2019 it created the post of Chief of Defence Staff, a reform widely requested after Kargil.
The Jana Sangh's original aim was to reverse the partition of India, so it regarded Pakistan's existence as illegitimate. During the Cold War the party opposed non-alignment and favoured closeness to the United States. Vajpayee called the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia a "dance of destruction", and the BJP strongly condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Modi began with a pragmatic approach to Pakistan, visiting in 2015, but relations soured and his stance has since been called hardline. On the Russian invasion of Ukraine, India abstained on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2623, and the Congress leadership backed that position.
In 1965 Deendayal Upadhyaya formulated integral humanism, which he described as an indigenous economic model putting the human being at center stage. It is the party's official philosophy. Alongside it sits Hindutva, an ideology articulated by the independence activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
The party says Hindutva is cultural nationalism that favours Indian culture over westernisation and therefore covers all Indians, whatever their religion. Scholars and analysts describe it as an effort to recast India as a Hindu country to the exclusion of other religions. The BJP softened its stance after the NDA formed in 1998 because its partners held broader ideologies.
Back in the first NDA government, education became a battleground. It reorganised the National Council of Educational Research and Training and had it extensively revise school textbooks. Various scholars saw the history revisions as a covert attempt to saffronise Indian history. The same government introduced Hindu astrology as a college subject over objections from leading scientists.
In 2014 Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, previously associated with the RSS, became chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research. Historians, including some sympathetic to the BJP, questioned his credentials as a historian. Scholars Nandini Sundar and Kiran Bhatty write that many RSS-linked appointees to universities and research institutions lacked the qualifications for their posts.
The Modi administration also changed approved history textbooks. The changes reduced the role of Nehru, praised Modi, and portrayed Indian society as harmonious and free of inequity.
The party supports a uniform civil code, which would replace religion-specific personal laws with one set for every citizen. Historian Yogendra Malik argues that this ignores the protections needed for the Muslim minority's cultural identity. The government has also criminalised the practice of triple talaq.
On migration, the BJP opposes illegal immigration from Bangladesh, mostly in Assam and West Bengal, and says it threatens security and stability. Academics note that it calls Hindu migrants refugees and reserves the word illegal for Muslims. Academic Michael Gillan saw it as an emotive issue for rallying Hindu sentiment where the party had been weak. The party later formed the government in Assam.
In 2013 the Supreme Court reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises homosexuality. BJP president Rajnath Singh said the party supported it because it considered homosexuality unnatural, though the stance softened after 2014. In a legal affidavit, the Modi government opposed same-sex marriage, warning of "complete havoc with the delicate balance of personal laws in the country".
The party's constitution allowed any qualified member to serve as national or state president for a single three-year term until 2012. That year it was amended to allow a maximum of two consecutive terms. The president is the highest authority in a strictly hierarchical structure.
Below the president sits the National Executive, the higher decision-making body, which includes vice-presidents, general secretaries, treasurers and secretaries. The same pattern repeats at the state, regional, district and local levels.
The BJP is a cadre-based party, and many of its lower-level members come from the RSS and its affiliates, loosely known as the Sangh Parivar. These include the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the RSS students' wing, and the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, its farmers' division. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, its labour union, is another.
The party has its own subsidiary bodies as well. Among them are the BJP Mahila Morcha, its women's division, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, its youth wing, and the BJP Minority Morcha. The youth wing remains a member of the International Democracy Union, though the party itself left that group of centre-right and right-wing parties by 2024.
The BJP claims more than 170 million members as of October 2022, which would make it one of the largest parties in the world. In September 2024 Modi launched a new membership drive. It was controversial for what critics called deceptive and coercive enrolment by party workers, and in Gujarat minor schoolchildren were enrolled.
Critics also point to the party's messaging. In September 2018, at a party meeting in Rajasthan, Amit Shah said the BJP's IT cell had influenced the media during the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections. He added that the party should be able to deliver any message to the public, "whether sweet or sour, true or fake."
In April 2024 the US State Department criticised the BJP for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories involving George Soros. In December 2024 the French newspaper Mediapart accused the party of falsifying its reports and said no facts supported a conspiracy theory the BJP was promoting.
The party's own national leadership roll tells its recent story. Of the 56 people from the BJP who had held the post of chief minister as of February 2025-16 were serving at that time.
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Common questions
What does Bharatiya Janata Party mean?
The name translates literally as Indian People's Party. The party is commonly known as the BJP.
How many Lok Sabha seats did the BJP win in its first general election?
It won two seats in 1984, from Mehsana in Gujarat and Hanamkonda in Andhra Pradesh.
What was the Jana Sangh?
The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was founded in 1951 by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in collaboration with the RSS. It was widely regarded as the RSS's political arm and is the BJP's predecessor.
Who has led the BJP in government?
Atal Bihari Vajpayee served as prime minister three times between 1996 and 2004. Narendra Modi has been prime minister since the 26th of May 2014.
What is Hindutva?
Hindutva is the ideology the BJP follows, articulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The party calls it cultural nationalism, while scholars describe it as seeking to recast India as a Hindu country.
What is the Sangh Parivar?
It is the loose family of organisations tied to the RSS, including student, farmer and labour groups. Many of the BJP's lower-level members come from it.
All sources
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