The New Bjp: Modi and the Making of the World's Largest Political Party

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About the Book In election after election since 2014, both at the Union and state levels, the BJP has won more often than it has lost-a clear indication of growth beyond its core Hindu base. The question is, why do so many people across divisions of caste, religion and gender vote for a party with unapologetically aggressive Hindutva politics? Are its much-publicised development schemes, whatever their flaws, the big pull factor? Or the active mobilisation of the RSS cadre to its cause?

In this fascinating revisionist history, political scientist and journalist Nalin Mehta examines how the BJP became the world's largest political party. He goes beyond the usual narrative of the party's Hindutva politics to explain how, under Narendra Modi, it reshaped the Indian polity using its own brand of social engineering. This reconstruction was cleverly powered by new caste coalitions, the claim of a new welfare state that focused on marginalised social groups and the making of a women-voter base.

Based on data from three unique indices-the Mehta-Singh Social Index, which studies the caste composition of Indian political parties; the Narad Index, which calculates communication patterns across topics and audiences; and PollNiti, which connects and tallies hundreds of political and economic datasets-The New BJP is full of startling insights into the way both the party and the country function. Previously untapped historical records, exclusive interviews with party leaders and comprehensive reportage from across India provide a fresh understanding of the BJP's growth areas, including the Northeast and south India.

A lucid and objective study of the BJP and India today, this is a book that demands engagement and debate from every side of the political divide.

About the Author Professor Nalin Mehta is Dean, School of Modern Media, UPES; Advisor, Global University Systems; and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He is an award-winning social scientist, journalist and author who has held senior leadership positions in major Indian media companies and in international financing institutions like the Global Fund in Geneva, Switzerland. He has taught and held research positions at universities and institutions in Australia (ANU, La Trobe University), Singapore (NUS), Switzerland (International Olympic Museum) and India (IIM Bangalore, Shiv Nadar University).

He was previously Executive Editor, The Times of India-Online, where he led a number of AI-led tech innovations to redefine digital media. He has also served as Managing Editor, India Today (English TV channel) and Consulting Editor, The Times of India. Mehta is the author of five bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including India on Television (winner of the Asian Publishing Award for Best Book on Asian Media, 2009), Behind a Billion Screens (longlisted as Business Book of the Year, Tata Literature Live, 2015), and most recently, Dreams of a Billion (2020, co-authored).

Introduction A jai Sri Ram' Sticker and a Family Argument: The BJP and a Personal Retracing My family's first domestic political fight, as far as I can remember, was over the Ram Temple. My grandfather brought a 'Jai Sri Ram' (Victory to Lord Ram) sticker from somewhere and pasted it on the front of my father's Bajaj 150 scooter. Dad blew his top.

My grandfather could not understand this reaction. 'Ram is our God. We worship him every day in this house. What's your problem with a sticker that has his name?' he asked with furious indignation.

`Yes, but this is now a political slogan. I am in the Army, responded my father. 'It would be treason to sport a political sticker and drive this scooter while wearing my uniform, I remember him saying.

It was September 1990. L.K. Advani, then president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had just started his 10,000-km Rath Yatra (literally, `chariot journey'), from the ancient reconstructed temple of Somnath on the western Gujarat coast to the disputed Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya in the heart of Uttar Pradesh (UP).

India's current prime minister, Narendra Modi, had just started making his name in Gujarat as a local BJP apparatchik. His name first appeared as a politician in the pages of The Times of India in 1988, as the organiser of an anti-Congress rasta-roko agitation on farmer demands in Gujarat,' but not many outside the state had heard of him. That wider recognition would not come until he became a key organiser of the Yatra's Gujarat leg in 1990.

**Contents and Sample Pages**