Since the 1990s, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, National People's Party) has emerged as the largest single, and perhaps the most influential, political party in India. Founded in April 1980, the heir of antecedent political efforts, the BJP has steadily increased its appeal among the Indian electorate. In the nationwide parliamentary elections of 1984, of the total of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha (the People's Assembly), the party succeeded in winning only 2. In 1998, it succeeded to an unprecedented victory by winning 180 seats, a commanding 26 percent of total votes cast. Together with its allies, the party controlled 248 seats, supported by 37 percent of total popular votes. “Hindu nationalism” had become a significant, and potentially a determinant, factor in the contemporary politics of the Indian subcontinent.

Commentators have characterized that phenomenal success as the rise of “Hindu fundamentalism,” “religious nationalism,” and “Hindu supremacism.” The BJP is spoken of as the “party of choice of the upper caste conservative Hindus.” Less-constrained critics speak of “Hindutva,” the ideology of the BJP, “as a modern variant of Brahmanism, a virulent ideology of hatred and fascism that seeks to establish an ethnically pure Hindu Rashtra [nation] inhabited only by white-skinned Aryans.” Should such characterization be true, one is clearly speaking not of neofascism, but of neonazism, a lineal descendent of Adolf Hitler's racism.