Many members of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) began to contemplate the formation of a political party to continue their work, begun in the days of the British Raj, and take their ideology further. Around the same time, Syama Prasad Mukherjee left the Hindu Mahasabha political party that he had once led because of a disagreement with that party over permitting non-Hindu membership.[12][13][14] The BJS was subsequently started by Mukherjee on 21 October 1951[1] in Delhi, with the collaboration of the RSS, as a "nationalistic alternative" to the Congress Party.[15]
After the death of Mukherjee in 1953, RSS activists in the BJS edged out the career politicians and made it a political arm of the RSS and an integral part of the RSS family of organisations (Sangh Parivar).[16]
The strongest election performance of the BJS came in the 1967 Lok Sabha election in which it won 35 seats,[17][18] when the Congress majority was its thinnest ever.[19]
The BJS leadership strongly supported a strong policy against Pakistan and China, and were averse to the Communist idelogy and the Soviet Union. Many BJS leaders also initiated the drive to ban cow slaughter nationwide in the early 1960s.[20]
The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was created in 1951, and the first general election it contested was in 1951–52, in which it won only three Lok Sabha seats, in line with the four seats won by Hindu Mahasabha and three seats won by Ram Rajya Parishad. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Durga Charan Banerjee were elected from Bengal and Uma Shankar Trivedi from Rajasthan. All the like-minded parties formed a block in the Parliament, led by Shyama Prasad Mookerjee.[21][17]
^Graham, Bruce D. "The Jana Sangh as a Nationalist Rally". Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics. Cambridge University Press. p. 94.
^Thachil, Tariq (2014). Elite Parties, Poor Voters. Cambridge University Press. p. 42.
^Kochanek, Stanley (2007). India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation. Cengage Learning. p. 333.
^Baxter, Craig (1969). The Jana Sangh: a biography of an Indian political party. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 171.
^Marty, Martin E. (1996). Fundamentalisms and the State. University of Chicago Press. p. 418.
^Field, John Osgood. Electoral Politics in the Indian States. Manohar Book Service. p. 28.
^[[Lahiry, Sutapa. “JANA SANGH AND BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY : A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF THEIR PHILOSOPHY AND STRATEGY AND THEIR PROXIMITY WITH THE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE SANGH PARIVAR.” The Indian Journal of Political Science, vol. 66, no. 4, 2005, pp. 831–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41856171. Accessed 8 Jan. 2024.]]
^Kanungo, Pralaya (November 2006), "Myth of the Monolith: The RSS Wrestles to Discipline Its Political Progeny", Social Scientist, 34 (11/12): 51–69, JSTOR27644183
^"Anti-cow slaughter mob storms Parliament | From the Archives (dated 8 November 1966)". The Hindu. 8 November 2016. ISSN0971-751X. Retrieved 26 January 2020. Thousands of rupees worth of damage to buildings and vehicles, both private and public, was caused by the mob which, in a violent and vociferous way, was demonstrating for the imposition of a ban on cow slaughter by Government. The parties who organised the demonstration, the number of participants in which was estimated between 3 lakhs and 7 lakhs, were the Jan Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Arya Samaj and the Sanatan Dharma Sabha
Graham, B. D. (1990). Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Cambridge University Press. ISBN0-521-38348X.
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