Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organisation. It is the progenitor and leader of a large body of organisations called the Sangh Parivar, which has developed a presence in all facets of Indian society and includes the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling political party under Narendra Modi, the 14th prime minister of India. Mohan Bhagwat has served as the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS since March 2009.
Bajrang Dal is a Hindu nationalist militant organisation that forms the youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). It is a member of the right-wing Sangh Parivar. The ideology of the organisation is based on Hindutva. It was founded on 1 October 1984 in Uttar Pradesh, and began spreading more in the 2010s throughout India, although its most significant base remains the northern and central portions of the country.
Narendra Damodardas Modi is an Indian politician who has served as the 14th prime minister of India since May 2014. Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Varanasi. He is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation. He is the longest-serving prime minister from outside the Indian National Congress.
The Liberhan Commission was a long-running inquiry commissioned by the Government of India to investigate the destruction of the disputed structure Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992. Led by retired High Court Judge M. S. Liberhan, it was formed on 16 December 1992 by an order of the Indian Home Union Ministry after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December and the subsequent riots there. The commission was originally mandated to submit its report within three months. Extensions were given 48 times, and after a delay of 17 years, the one-man commission submitted the report to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on 30 June 2009. In November 2009, a day after a newspaper published the allegedly leaked contents of the report, the report was tabled in Parliament by the Home Minister P. Chidambaram.
Keshubhai Patel was an Indian politician who was the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 1995 and again from 1998 to 2001. He was a six-time member of Gujarat Legislative Assembly. He was a member of RSS since 1940s, of Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1960s, Janata Party in 1970s, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 1980. He left the BJP in 2012 and formed the Gujarat Parivartan Party. He was elected from Visavadar in the 2012 state assembly election but resigned in 2014 due to ill health and merged his party with BJP. He was awarded India's third highest civilian award the Padma Bhushan posthumously in 2021.
The Right to Information (RTI) is an act of the Parliament of India which sets out the rules and procedures regarding citizens' right to information. It replaced the former Freedom of Information Act, 2002. Under the provisions of RTI Act, any citizen of India may request information from a "public authority" which is required to reply expeditiously or within thirty days. In case of matter involving a petitioner's life and liberty, the information has to be provided within 48 hours. The Act also requires every public authority to computerize their records for wide dissemination and to proactively publish certain categories of information so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally.
Salwa Judum was a militia that was mobilised and deployed as part of counterinsurgency operations in Chhattisgarh, India, aimed at countering Naxalite activities in the region. The militia, consisting of local tribal youth, received support and training from the Chhattisgarh state government. It was outlawed and banned by a Supreme Court court order but continues to exist in the form of armed auxiliary forces, District Reserve Groups, and other vigilante groups.
The Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS) is an Indian farmers' organization that is politically linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. BKS was founded by Dattopant Thengadi in 1978. As of 2000, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh claimed BKS had a quarter million members, organized in 11,000 villages and 301 districts across the country. The organization is dominated by landed gentry.
Hindu terrorism, sometimes called Hindutva terror or, metonymically, saffron terror, refer to terrorist acts carried out on the basis of motivations in broad association with Hindu nationalism or Hindutva.
Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) is an Indian right-wing Hindu organisation based on Hindu nationalism. The VHP was founded in 1964 by M. S. Golwalkar and S. S. Apte in collaboration with Swami Chinmayananda. Its stated objective is "to organise, consolidate the Hindu society and to serve and protect the Hindu Dharma". It was established to construct and renovate Hindu temples, and deal with matters of cow slaughter and religious conversion. The VHP is a member of the Sangh Parivar group, the family of Hindu nationalist organisations led by the RSS.
The Muslim Rashtriya Manch is a Muslim organisation in India, inspired by the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It was formed in 2002 in the presence of the then RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan to grow dialogue with Muslim community.
Amit Anil Chandra Shah is an Indian politician who is currently serving as the 31st Minister of Home Affairs since 2019 and the 1st Minister of Co-operation of India since 2021. He served as the 10th President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 2014 to 2020. He has also served as chairman of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) since 2014. He was elected to the lower house of Parliament, Lok Sabha, in the 2019 Indian general elections from Gandhinagar. Earlier, he had been elected as a member of the upper house of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, from Gujarat from 2017 to 2019.
The Ajmer Dargah bombing occurred on 11 October 2007, in the courtyard of Sufi maulana Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India, after the Iftar period had started. On 22 March 2017 a Special NIA Court convicted three Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharaks Devendra Gupta, Bhavesh Patel and Sunil Joshi. Sunil Joshi and Devendra Gupta were found guilty on charges of conspiracy and Bhavesh Bhai Patel was found guilty of planting the explosive on the blast site. Gupta and Patel were awarded life imprisonment. Sunil Joshi had been found shot dead in mysterious circumstances soon after the blast in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh.
Sanjay Vinayak Joshi is an Indian politician belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He was a long-time member of the Gujarat BJP and was a member of the BJP national executive until he was forced to resign after public pressure from Narendra Modi. During his 2001-2005 tenure as National General Secretary (Organization), he led the organization that enabled BJP to win the Assembly elections in nine states.
The Indian general election of 2014 were held to constitute the 16th Lok Sabha in India. Voting took place in all 543 parliamentary constituencies of India to elect members of parliament in the Lok Sabha. The result of this election was declared on 16 May. The 15th Lok Sabha completed its constitutional mandate on 31 May 2014. Since the last general election in 2009, the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement by Anna Hazare, and other similar moves by Baba Ramdev, have gathered momentum and political interest. Issues such as Inflation, price rise and corruption were some of the chief issues.
Dr. Bimal N. Patel is Professor of International Law and Vice-Chancellor of the Rashtriya Raksha University, an Institute of National Importance of India, established by the Parliament of India through RRU Act No. 31, by the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. The headquarters of the University is in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. Professor Patel has been serving as a Member of the National Security Advisory Board, an advisory board to the National Security Council headed by the Prime Minister of India. He is a member of the Financial Sector Regulatory Appointments Search Committee (FSRASC), headed by the Cabinet Secretary, established by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) to make recommendations of candidates for the top positions of the financial regulators of India – Reserve Bank of India, Securities and Exchange Board of India, Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority of India, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India and International Financial Services Centre Authority. Patel served as the Director of the Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar for two consecutive terms (2008-2019). He was appointed by a high-level committee headed by the then Chief Justice of India, K G Balakrishnan, at the Supreme Court of India. He served as a member of the 21st Law Commission of India, headed by Justice Balbir Singh Chauhan, Supreme Court of India, and contributed independently or jointly 15 reports or referrals by the Supreme Court of India, including among others, criminal justice reforms, one nation-one election, sedition law, tribunalisation of justice system and prepared consolidated report on all Central Acts of India from 1834 to 2017. He is also one of the Lead Academic Advisers to India for India's tenure as a member of the UN Security Council 2021-22. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the ICRC International Review of the Red Cross, Geneva. Prof. Patel is co-chair of the American Society of International Law Interest Group on Law of the Sea and a Member of Antarctica Environment Protection and Governance Committee, Government of India. He has served or serves various governmental and public sector organisations and academic institutions. His publications on India and International Law and Responsibility of International Organisations are reviewed and referred by international law scholars and journals. Patel is a former international civil servant, scholar, and academician of international law and diplomacy. An international law jurist, he has extensively studied, researched, commented, and published works on the administrative, procedural and substantive jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Labour Organization Administrative Tribunal (Geneva). He has published, edited several books, research papers/articles/surveys in leading academic and international law journals. He has been involved in drafting several national and state primary and secondary legislation, regulations, rules. He has delivered and served as Visiting Faculty at universities in Asia-Pacific and Europe. He has served at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague, Netherlands.
Jashodaben Narendrabhai Modi is a retired Indian school teacher. She is the estranged wife of Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India. The couple were married in 1968 when she was about 17 and Modi was 18. A short time into the marriage, her husband, Narendra Modi, abandoned her. He did not acknowledge the marriage publicly until he was legally required to do so prior to the 2014 Indian general elections to the Lok Sabha. In 2015, Jashodaben Modi retired from her teaching job.
Starting in July 2015, the people of India's Patidar community, seeking Other Backward Class (OBC) status, held public demonstrations across the Indian state of Gujarat.
Nandini Sundar is an Indian professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics whose research interests include political sociology, law, and inequality. She is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2010. She was also awarded the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research in 2016.
Archbishop Thomas Ignatius Macwan is the current archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gandhinagar.
