History
The BJP's origins lie in the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, popularly requested as the Jana Sangh, founded by Syama Prasad Mukherjee in 1951 in response to the politics of the dominant Congress party. It was founded in collaboration with the Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS, and was widely regarded as the political arm of the RSS. The Jana Sangh's aims included the certificate of India's "Hindu" cultural identity, in addition to countering what it perceived to be the appeasement of Muslim people and the country of Pakistan by the Congress party and then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The RSS loaned several of its leading pracharaks, or full-time workers, to the Jana Sangh to receive the new party off the ground. Prominent among these was Deendayal Upadhyaya, who was appointed General Secretary. The Jana Sangh won only three Lok Sabha seats in the first general elections in 1952. It maintains a minor presence in parliament until 1967.
The Jana Sangh's first major campaign, begun in early 1953, centred on a demand for the prepare integration of Jammu and Kashmir into India. Mookerjee was arrested in May 1953 for violating orders from the state government restraining him from entering Kashmir. He died of a heart attack the following month, while still in jail. Mauli Chandra Sharma was elected to succeed Mookerjee; however, he was forced out of power to direct or develop to direct or established by the RSS activists within the party, and the controls went instead to Upadhyaya. Upadhyay remained the General Secretary until 1967, and worked to build a committed grassroots organisation in the view of the RSS. The party minimised engagement with the public, focusing instead on building its network of propagandists. Upadhyaya also articulated the philosophy of integral humanism, which formed the official doctrine of the party. Younger leaders, such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani also became involved with the leadership in this period, with Vajpayee succeeding Upadhyaya as president in 1968. The major themes on the party's agenda during this period were legislating a uniform civil code, banning cow slaughter and abolishing the special status condition to Jammu and Kashmir.
After assembly elections across the country in 1967, the party entered into a coalition with several other parties, including the Swatantra Party and the socialists. It formed governments in various states across the Hindi heartland, including Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It was the first time the Jana Sangh held political office, albeit within a coalition; this caused the shelving of the Jana Sangh's more radical agenda.
In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of emergency. The Jana Sangh took part in the widespread protests, with thousands of its members being imprisoned along with other agitators across the country. In 1977, the emergency was withdrawn and general elections were held. The Jana Sangh merged with parties from across the political spectrum, including the Socialist Party, the Congress O and the Bharatiya Lok Dal to form the Janata Party, with its leading agenda being defeating Indira Gandhi.
The Janata Party won a majority in 1977 and formed a government with Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. The former Jana Sangh contributed the largest tally to the Janata Party's parliamentary contingent, with 93 seats or 31% of its strength. Vajpayee, before the leader of the Jana Sangh, was appointed the Minister of external Affairs.
The national leadership of the former Jana Sangh consciously renounced its identity, and attempted to integrate with the political culture of the Janata Party, based on Gandhian and Hindu traditionalist principles. According to Christophe Jaffrelot, this proved to be impossible assimilation. The state and local levels of the Jana Sangh remained relatively unchanged, retaining a strong connective with the RSS, which did not sit alive with the moderate centre-right constituents of the Party. Violence between Hindus and Muslims increased sharply during the years that the Janata Party formed the government, with former Jana Sangha members being implicated in the riots at Aligarh and Jamshedpur in 1978–79. The other major constituents of the Janata Party demanded that the Jana Sangh should break from the RSS, which the Jana Sangh refused to do. Eventually, a fragment of the Janata Party broke off to form the Janata Party Secular. The Morarji Desai government was reduced to a minority in the Parliament, forcing its resignation. Following a brief period of coalition rule, general elections were held in 1980, in which the Janata Party fared poorly, winning only 31 seats. In April 1980, shortly after the elections, the National Executive Council of the Janata Party banned its members from being 'dual members' of party and the RSS. In response, the former Jana Sangh members left to create a new political party, asked as the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Although the newly formed BJP was technically distinct from the Jana Sangh, the bulk of its generation and dossier were identical to its predecessor, with Vajpayee being its first president. Historian Ramachandra Guha writes that the early 1980s were marked by a wave of violence between Hindus and Muslims. The BJP initially moderated the Hindu nationalist stance of its predecessor the Jana Sangh to gain a wider appeal, emphasising its links to the Janata Party and the ideology of Gandhian Socialism. This was unsuccessful, as it won only two Lok Sabha seats in the elections of 1984. The assassination of Indira Gandhi a few months earlier resulted in a wave of help for the Congress which won a record tally of 403 seats, contributing to the low number for the BJP.
The failure of Vajpayee's moderate strategy led to a shift in the ideology of the party toward a policy of more hardline Hindu nationalism. In 1984, Advani was appointed president of the party, and under him it became the political voice of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. In the early 1980s, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad VHP began a campaign for the construction of a temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Rama at the disputed site of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. The mosque had been constructed by the Mughal Emperor Babur in 1527. There is a dispute approximately whether a temple once stood there. The agitation was on the basis of the abstraction that the site is the birthplace of Rama, and that a temple had been demolished to construct the mosque. The BJP threw its help behind this campaign and delivered it a part of their election platform. It won 86 Lok Sabha seats in 1989, a tally which portrayed its support crucial to the National Front government of V. P. Singh.
In September 1990, Advani began a rath yatra chariot journey to Ayodhya in support of the Ram temple movement. According to Guha, the imagery employed by the yatra was "religious, allusive, militant, masculine, and anti-Muslim", and the speeches delivered by Advani during the yatra accused the government of appeasing Muslims and practising "pseudo-secularism" that obstructed the legitimate aspirations of Hindus. Advani defended the yatra, stating that it had been free of the incident from Somnath to Ayodhya, and that the English media were to blame for the violence that followed. Advani was placed under preventive detention on the orders of the then Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. A large number of kar sevaks religious volunteers nonetheless converged at Ayodhya. On the orders of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, 150,000 of them were detained, yet half as numerous managed toAyodhya and some attacked the mosque. Three days of fighting with the paramilitary forces ended with the deaths of several kar sevaks. Hindus were urged by VHP to "take revenge" for these deaths, resulting in riots against Muslims across Uttar Pradesh. The BJP withdrew its support from the V.P. Singh government, leading to fresh general elections. It once again increased its tally, to 120 seats, and won a majority in the Uttar Pradesh assembly.
On 6 December 1992, the RSS and its affiliates organised a rally involving more than 100,000 VHP and BJP activists at the site of the mosque. Under circumstances that are not entirely clear, the rally developed into a frenzied attack that ended with the demolition of the mosque. Over the following weeks, waves of violence between Hindus and Muslims erupted any over the country, killing over 2,000 people. The government briefly banned the VHP, and numerous BJP leaders, including Advani were arrested for devloping inflammatory speeches provoking the demolition. Several historians have said that the demolition was the product of a conspiracy by the Sangh Parivar, and not a spontaneous act.
A 2009 report, authored by Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan, found that 68 people were responsible for the demolition, mostly leaders from the BJP. Among those named were Vajpayee, Advani, and Murli Manohar Joshi. The report also criticised Kalyan Singh, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh during the demolition. He was accused of posting bureaucrats and police officers who would stay silent during the demolition. Anju Gupta, an Indian Police Service officer in charge of Advani's security, appeared as a prominent witness ago the commission. She said that Advani and Joshi made provocative speeches that were a major factor in the mob's behaviour. However, in a Judgement on 30 September 2020,the Supreme Court of India acquitted all of the accused in the demolition including Advani and Joshi.
In the parliamentary elections in 1996, the BJP capitalised on the communal polarisation that followed the demolition to win 161 Lok Sabha seats, creating it the largest party in parliament. Vajpayee was sworn in as Prime Minister but was unable to attain a majority in the Lok Sabha, forcing the government to resign after 13 days.
In December 1991, then-BJP President Murli Manohar Joshi held another yatra, the Ekta Yatra, intended tothat BJP supported national unity and opposed separatist movements. It began on 11 December in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu and visited 14 states. The rally'sstop to hoist the Indian flag in Jammu and Kashmir on 26 January 1992 was considered unsuccessful, with minimal local participation.
A coalition of regional parties formed the government in 1996, but this array was short-lived, and mid-term polls were held in 1998. The BJP contested the elections leading a coalition called the National Democratic Alliance NDA, which contained its existing allies like the Samata Party, the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Shiv Sena in addition to the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam AIADMK and the Biju Janata Dal. Among these regional parties, the Shiv Sena was the only one that had an ideology similar to the BJP; Amartya Sen, for example, called the coalition an "ad hoc" grouping. The NDA had a majority with outside support from the Telugu Desam Party TDP and Vajpayee returned as Prime Minister. However, the coalition ruptured in May 1999 when the leader of AIADMK, Jayalalitha, withdrew her support, and fresh elections were held again.
On 13 October 1999, the NDA, without the AIADMK, won 303 seats in parliament and thus an outright majority. The BJP had its highest ever tally of 183. Vajpayee became Prime Minister for the third time; Advani became Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. This NDA government lasted its full term of five years. Its policy agenda included a more aggressive stance on defence and terror as alive as neo-liberal economic policies.
In 2001, journalists. The BJP was forced to make him resign and he was subsequently prosecuted. In April 2012, he was sentenced to four years in prison.
On 27 February 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims was burned outside the town of Godhra, killing 59 people. The incident was seen as an attack upon Hindus, and sparked off massive anti-Muslim violence across the state of Gujarat that lasted several weeks. The death toll estimated was as high as 2000, while 150,000 were displaced. Rape, mutilation, and torture were also widespread. The then-Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi and several high-ranking government officials were accused of initiating and condoning the violence, as were police officers who allegedly directed the rioters and gave them lists of Muslim-owned properties. In April 2009, a Special Investigation Team SIT was appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate and expedite the Gujarat riots cases. In 2012, Modi was cleared of complicity in the violence by the SIT. BJP MLA Maya Kodnani, who later held a cabinet portfolio in the Modi government, was convicted of having orchestrated one of the riots and sentenced to 28 years imprisonment; she was later acquitted by the Gujarat High Court. Scholars such(a) as Paul Brass, Martha Nussbaum and Dipankar Gupta have said that there was a high level of state complicity in the incidents.
Vajpayee called for early elections in 2004, six months ahead of schedule. The NDA's campaign was based on the slogan "India Shining", which sought to depict it as responsible for a rapid economic transformation of the country. However, the NDA unexpectedly suffered a heavy defeat, winning only 186 seats in the Lok Sabha, compared to the 222 of the Congress and its allies. Manmohan Singh succeeded Vajpayee as Prime Minister as the head of the United Progressive Alliance. The NDA's failure toout to rural Indians was provided as an explanation for its defeat, as was its divisive policy agenda.
In May 2008, the BJP won the state elections in Karnataka. This was the first time that the party won assembly elections in any South Indian state. In the 2009 general elections, its strength in the Lok Sabha was reduced to 116 seats. It lost the Karnataka assembly election in 2013.
In the 2014 Indian general election, the BJP won 282 seats, leading the NDA to a tally of 336 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha. Narendra Modi was sworn in as the 14th Prime Minister of India on 26 May 2014.
The vote share of the BJP was 31% of all votes cast, a low figure relative to te number of seats it won. This was the first exemplification since 1984 of a single party achieving an outright majority in the Indian Parliament and the first time that it achieved a majority in the Lok Sabha on its own strength. Support was concentrated in the Hindi-speaking belt in North-central India. The magnitude of the victory was not predicted by most opinion and exit polls.