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This chapter addresses some speculative suggestions about the sustainability and ownership of reforms. The critical role of the emergence of regional parties in national politics with neutral economic ideology is considered. The Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took the imperative need for a rapid double-digit growth in their 2004 election manifestos,and the associated need for attracting private foreign investment to supplement domestic savings, along with the necessity to upgrade the technological base towards international competitiveness. As long as the instrumental role of rapid growth for classifying distributional conflicts in an orderly fashion is discerned by all the political parties in the coalition game, the reform process is bound to continue.

Madhukeshwar Desai, the great-grandson of Morarji Desai, a Congress politician and former Prime Minister of India, is the vice president of the youth wing of the BJP. A lawyer by training, he is currently the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration (MCIA), a joint effort between the Government of Maharashtra, the international and domestic arbitration and the business community. Madhukeshwar sees the BJP is the only party in India in which anyone can aspire to rise to the top. He also believes in some of the central tenets of the BJP’s ideology, especially that all Indian citizens are treated equally and that the country should move towards a uniform civil code.

In regard to the question of militancy versus tolerance, this chapter reports on a trip the author made to Ayodhya in early 1993, a month after Hindu militants destroyed the mosque that had been built there by a lieutenant of the Mughal emperor Babar in 1528. A symbol of Muslim hegemony in India's past, the Babri Mosque had emerged in the 1980s as a central feature of the rhetoric of hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) that was spread by India's principal right-wing organizations. One of these is the Bharatiya Janata Party, which, until the elections of spring 2004, had led India's ruling political coalition. On the whole, the need to build a ruling coalition took precedence over the need to build Rama's temple. Yet as events in Gujarat and Maharashtra have shown, anti-Muslim Hindu militancy backed by the BJP and its associate organizations is far from dead.

The Introduction lays out the structure of the book, including its theoretical foundations concerning norms and their usefulness for analysing Indian foreign policy across different political ideologies. These foundations rest upon a norm-based and identity-driven account of security that scrutinises multiple norms simultaneously, and highlights the historical experiences of India’s elites in terms of how they perceive Indian security. Such an approach allows for the comparison of foreign policy norms prior to 1998 firstly with those of the BJP-led 1998-2004 NDA and then with subsequent post-2004 governments. It is argued that these ideational factors (primarily different political identities and their composite norms) provide a superior understanding of Indian security by highlighting the impact of temporal factors (such as history, experience, and interaction), and successfully linking domestic ideology with foreign policy.

This chapter looks at the trajectory of the BJP’s (often contrasting) political origins, ideologies, and agendas concerning India’s domestic and foreign policies over the same 1947–1998 period. This contrast is made apparent through its investigation of the BJP’s political heritage, an analysis of the origins of its Hindutva ideology and the party’s role as the political arm of the wider Sangh Parivar. After an analysis of the ideological basis of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) (the BJP’s predecessor) from its foundations in 1951 to its disbanding in the late 1970s, the analysis concentrates on the political rise of the BJP, charting its emergence onto the national stage in the 1980s. The chapter thus lays out the norms central to Hindu nationalism across multiple political generations, charts Hindutva‘s electoral rise, and sets up the evaluation in the next five Chapters of specific elements of Indian security under the BJP-led NDA regime.

The Conclusion sums up all of these perspectives and importantly notes how the BJP-led NDA government witnessed profound changes concerning the development and evolution of India’s security practice. It finds that these changes continued to be reflected in Indian security policy after the NDA left office in 2004 and have been maintained by successive Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments. In addition, the Conclusion highlights the efficacy of a fuller ideational account of India’s security practice through the norm-based comparison of differing political ideologies. Such an approach further indicates how norms can often have primacy over material factors. The Conclusion then finally discusses the future trajectory of Indian security and Hindu nationalism’s potential influence upon it, especially in light of their established position as India’s leading Opposition party and the forthcoming 2014 elections.

This chapter uses the recommendations of the government-appointed Sachar Committee to debate aspects of minority rights. “Majority” and “minority” are not unified, exclusive, or antagonistic categories. A religious majority, that is the Hindus, is as fragmented as the minority, that is, the Muslims. The 1990s saw the rise of a new force in Indian politics — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the successor of the Jana Sangh. The BJP, riding on the crest of a popular Hindutva wave, was spurned by its own following in UP after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The same process is at work in Gujarat.

Devendra Fadnavis, of the Bharatiya Janata Party, became the second-youngest chief minister of Maharashtra in 2014 at the age of 44. Belying expectations, he lasted a full five-year term in office governing the state renowned for its factional politics. His administrative skills were widely appreciated. He began his political career with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP, and gradually worked his way up the political ladder. Fadnavis has a long association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), where his father served as a pracharak. He attributes his poise and temperament to his upbringing in the RSS.

Jyotiraditya Scindia, recently of the BJP, is a member of the Indian parliament’s upper house. He is the scion of Gwalior’s royal family and joined active politics with Congress party upon the untimely death of his father, a Congress politician. He has held various portfolios as a minister in the cabinets of Manmohan Singh and was widely regarded as one of the senior-most leaders of the Congress Party. Facing limits to his politics in the Congress Party politics of Madhya Pradesh, Scindia switched to the BJP in 2020.

Poonam Mahajan is the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Youth Wing and MP from Mumbai North Central. Poonam is a firm believer in the importance of organization, especially a party’s organization. Her father, Pramod Mahajan, was a general secretary of the BJP. She is unequivocal in her belief that the BJP’s strength is its organization and cadre. She is proud of how the organization looks after its members. Poonam’s main concerns are joblessness, infrastructural development (especially toilets), and ensuring that Mumbai remains an important global city, part of a global village where international influences and trends have a long-lasting impact. She balances the need for infrastructural development with environmental protection, Mumbai’s needs for green spaces, and her passion for wildlife preservation.

Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, an Olympics silver medalist and former army officer who has served in counter-insurgency operations, is an unusual politician. He did not enter politics, either working his way through the BJP’s organization or familial connections. Rathore’s entry into politics was smooth - the BJP was looking for newer and non-political faces in its campaign in 2014. He fit the bill. However, it did take him some time to adjust to the workings of Indian bureaucracy and party organization. As an outsider, he is forever seeking to challenge the system and make it better.

Smriti Irani is perhaps the most recognizable younger female leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), not only because of her past as a popular television actor but also because she is very forthright and known speak her mind. Smriti Irani has a wicked sense of humour; she is a modern politician who, perhaps because of her own life experiences, is a big believer in individual responsibility. She stresses the role of individuals in creating the change that they seek.

Varun Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, carries both the privilege and burden of being the nephew, grandson, and great-grandson of Indian prime ministers. Yet, he is in the BJP, where the Nehru name is considered anathema. Varun is enigmatic. He writes prolifically on policy matters and is also known for controversial and divisive remarks. He is soft-spoken and appears sensitive, leaving us to wonder whether Varun Gandhi a liberal intellectual in the BJP or a firebrand politician.

This chapter discusses the coalition experiments of the Third Front—political parties opposed to both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It traces the evolution of the Third Front and identifies its ideological characteristics in the wider context of democratization in India. The main Third Front groups included the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which was in power from 1999 to 2004, and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which is currently the ruling party in India. This chapter contends that despite their short tenure and controversial track records, both the National Front and United Front governments are indicative of regionalization of Indian polity even at the national level.

This chapter analyses the dynamics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that came into being in 1999. It discusses the significance of the NDA in the context of a search for an alternative to single-party rule in India and highlights the level of understanding among the partners and maturity of the leaders of this twenty-four-party coalition that steered it through despite occasional hiccups. This chapter also describes the accomplishments of the NDA and suggests that it epitomized the federalization of Indian politics by guaranteeing legitimate space to regional political forces that remained integral to its existence.

This chapter turns to the contemporary period to show that PII and, specifically, victimhood matter today. It analyzes India's decision to declare nuclear weapons state status in 1998. It uses PII to explain why India decided to conduct further nuclear tests after the first halting tests in 1974, and why it conducted them in 1998. To do so, it utilizes thousands of articles in the Indian print media in 1974 and in the 1990s to demonstrate that a sense of victimization and entitlement regarding the nuclear issue did not exist in 1974, but had appeared by the 1998 decision.

This chapter investigates the expansion of the Shiv Sena into the Maharashtrian rural areas after the mid 1980s, and the socio-political context of the ‘Congress-system’. Inspired by the ideology of Hindutva, the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance formed the only effective alternative to the Congress’ structures in Maharashtra, and thus were able to attract many who sought alternative avenues of political mobility. The electoral campaigns of the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance were run on the common terrain of Hindu nationalism and communalism. The politics of the Shiv Sena towards Dalits illustrates the party’s usual strategy to win over minorities: offers of acceptance with threats of violence. The author discusses the alliance arithmetic of the Shiv Sena and the BJP, and how factionalism within the Congress helped in their victory in the 1996.

This chapter examines the complex relationship between diaspora and citizenship. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi famously developed his tactic of satyagraha on South African soil, cementing a deep relationship with India. Against this background, this chapter examines new diasporic connections between Indian South Africans and India, buoyed by the Indian government’s introduction of a number of measures such as a new ministry, an annual official diaspora convention in India, and the offer of special status for members of the Indian diaspora, but fell short of granting dual citizenship, arguably over concerns about security. This chapter provides a detailed examination of the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to South Africa in 2016. This politically and strategically important visit of 2016 generated intense debates over the relationship between India and its diaspora, India and South Africa, Indians and Africans, and Hindus and Muslims.