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.
Hindutva is a political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India. The political ideology was formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1922. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar.
The Akhil Bharatiya Jana Sangh (abbreviated asBJS or JS, short name: Jan Sangh, was an Indian nationalist political party. This party was established on 21 October 1951 in Delhi, and existed until 1977. Its three founding members were Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Balraj Madhok and Deendayal Upadhyaya. Jan Sangh was the political arm of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation. In 1977, it merged with several other left, centre and right parties opposed to the Indian National Congress and formed the Janata Party. In 1980, the members of erstwhile Jan Sangh quit the Janata party after the defeat in the 1980 general elections and formed the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is the direct political successor to the Jan Sangh.
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.
The Sangh Parivar refers, as an umbrella term, to the collection of Hindutva organisations spawned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which remain affiliated to it. These include the political party Bharatiya Janata Party, religious organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad, students union Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), religious militant organisation Bajrang Dal that forms the youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the worker's union Bharatiya Kisan Sangh.
Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, also known by his moniker Doctorji was a Hindutva activist, physician and the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Hedgewar founded the RSS in Nagpur in 1925, based on the ideology of Hindu nationalism.
Vinay Katiyar is a politician and the founder-president of Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the Hindu nationalist organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in India. He has served as an All India General Secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and as a Member of Parliament in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.
Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh is a non-profit, social, educational, and cultural organization of the Hindus living outside India. It was founded in 1940s in Kenya, it is currently active in 156 countries and estimates 3289 branches.
Organiser is a mouthpiece of the Hindu nationalist and voluntary organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It was launched as a newspaper in 1947 in the weeks before the Partition of India. The newspaper has been edited by A. R. Nair, K. R. Malkani, L. K. Advani, V. P. Bhatia, Seshadri Chari and Dr R. Balashanker. It has promoted misinformation on many occasions.
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) (transl. All India Students' Council) is a right-wing and an independent all India student organisation affiliated to the Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It is the world’s largest student organisation.
Balraj Madhok was an Indian political activist and politician from Jammu. Originally an activist of the nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), he later worked as a politician in the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS).
Sadhvi Rithambara is a Hindu Vestal (Sadhvi), public speaker and nationalist ideologue who is the founder-chairperson of Durga Vahini, the women's wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), established in 1991. She gained national prominence with VHP in the late 1980s through the Jan Jagran Abhiyan, and in the 1990s during the run up to the Babri Masjid demolition. Subsequently, she was named an accused in the Liberhan Commission report, though later acquitted by the CBI court in 2020.
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.
Hindu nationalism has been collectively referred to as the expression of political thought, based on the native social and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent. "Hindu nationalism" is a simplistic translation of Hindū Rāṣṭravād. It is better described as "Hindu polity".
Christophe Jaffrelot is a French political scientist and Indologist specialising in South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan. He is a professor of South Asian politics and history the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po (Paris), a professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute (London), and a Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).
Ghar Wapsi is the programme of religious conversion to Hinduism from Islam, Christianity, and other religions in India conducted by Indian Hindu nationalist organisations Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and their allies. The term owes to the Hindu nationalist ideology that all people of India are ancestrally Hindu and, hence, conversion to Hinduism is one of "returning home" to their ancestral roots.
These are the references for further information regarding the Sangh Parivar.
Pragya Singh Thakur, better known as SadhviPragya, is an Indian politician and former Member of Parliament who represented Bhopal and belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party. During her college days, she was an active member of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and later joined various affiliate organisations of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The 2007 Christmas violence in Kandhamal violence refers to the violence that occurred during the Christmas of 2007 between the groups led by Sangh Parivar together with the Sangh-affiliated Kui Samaj and the Christians in the Kandhamal district of Odisha.