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The RSS Network
The RSS is the Hindu nationalist group that helped create the BJP, and its network powered Modi. It has strong ideas about what India should be and what makes a country.
India is now the most populous country in the world, with a successful tech industry that is not yet at the frontier of AI.
India's View of the World
Its view of the world is multipolar, though not the Chinese way. Foreign minister Jaishankar has called China a revisionist power and India a reformist one. In the United Nations General Assembly, India, with 1.4 billion people and nuclear weapons, has one vote, exactly as many as Liechtenstein or Luxembourg. The Europeans and Americans organized much of international life at a time when nobody else had much standing. India wants a number of changes, and it sees the Chinese autocratic, top-down approach as neither possible for India nor good for the world.
Why does India hold only one UN vote?
The United Nations General Assembly follows the principle of one state, one vote, written into Article 18 of the UN Charter. Liechtenstein, with roughly forty thousand people, joined in 1990 and holds the same single vote as India. General Assembly resolutions are mostly recommendations rather than binding law. The more powerful body is the Security Council, where five countries hold permanent seats and a veto.
Why has India never held a permanent Security Council seat?
The five permanent members were fixed in the 1945 UN Charter, two years before India became independent from British rule. Since 2005 India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan have campaigned together for a seat as a group known as the G4. Changing the Charter requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly and approval by all five permanent members. No such change has been adopted since the Council was enlarged in 1965 from eleven to fifteen members.
How did the BJP rise to national power?
The BJP was founded in 1980 as the successor to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a party formed in 1951 with the backing of the RSS. It led coalition governments under Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2014, under Narendra Modi, it won 282 seats in the Lok Sabha. That was the first single-party majority in India's lower house in thirty years.
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