Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
Incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP claims to be the world’s largest political organisation, with almost 180 million members.The BJP was born in 1980 out of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh party, an offshoot of the far-right Hindu nationalist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The RSS, formed in 1925 along the lines of European ethnonationalism movements and fascist parties, wants India to be defined as a Hindu nation. Today, the secretive men-only organisation is the ideological fountainhead of dozens of Hindu right-wing groups, including the BJP, and counts Modi and many top BJP leaders as its lifetime members.
The BJP was founded shortly after the controversial imposition of a state of emergency by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of the Congress in 1975. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a prominent Bharatiya Jana Sangh leader, opposed the emergency – a plank that brought a coalition of anti-Congress parties to power in 1977.