The boy who once sold tea at a railway station has become the most influential Indian leader in generations, winning a landslide in election results announced on Thursday. Or so goes the story that has become the core of Narendra Modi’s extraordinary appeal.
Modi, 68, was born to a poor family in western India’s Gujarat state, where he developed a strong dislike for the ruling Congress party as a result of hanging around a political office near his father’s tea stall.
While still a child, he started attending daily meetings of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, said to be the world’s largest volunteer organisation, whose Hindu nationalist ideology envisions the country’s diverse Hindu population as a single nation with a sacred culture that should be given primacy in India.
Hindu nationalists were sidelined by India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose vision of India was of a secular nation at ease with its bewildering plurality. Their parties, including Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), struggled to win more than 10% of the national vote for decades until the 1990s, when they started to expand on the back of a national campaign to demolish a 16th-century Mughal mosque and replace it with a Hindu temple.
That push culminated in the destruction of the mosque by a mob of 150,000 Hindu activists, which triggered rioting across India that killed an estimated 2,000 people.
Still, the BJP’s support was limited to wealthier Hindus in the country’s north and west, with resistance to the party from poor, marginalised Hindus, Muslims and south Indians thought to be permanent hurdles to Hindu nationalist domination.
Modi’s magnetism, especially his personal branding as a tea boy who climbed to the country’s highest ranks, has changed those calculations, drawing vast support from the country’s emerging middle and lower-middle classes.
“He has managed to create this voting bloc – other party’s voters who are voting for the BJP just for Modi,” said Rahul Verma, a fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. “The shifts are actually happening among the more aspirational voters, who think Modi can fulfil their economic aspirations … This leader, who has risen from the ranks of a poor family, has become a symbol.”
This symbolism was especially potent among young Indians, a vital and growing electorate in a country with a median age younger than 28.
“They have grown up seeing the way of life in the west and in places like Singapore and China,” said Vivan Marwaha, a journalist who is writing a book on young Indians. “And Modi came on to the scene in 2014 and promised them bullet trains, a million new jobs, the world’s largest statue. It’s all very aspirational.”
Young Indians had grown up being told their country was on the cusp of becoming a superpower. In Modi, he said, they had a leader who spoke as if it already was.
Alongside aspiration, the BJP promotes a vision of Hindu cultural supremacy that sidelines the country’s 300m minority population. As chief minister of Gujarat state, Modi was a firebrand Hindutva campaigner. In 2002, anti-Muslim riots in his state killed at least 1,000 people, resulted in the future prime minister becoming an international pariah who was banned from entering the US.
In response, Modi presented himself as an outsider being attacked by elites: a refrain that would become a central part of his political messaging. “He would say he was constantly being targeted by the English-speaking media out of Delhi,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of a biography of the Indian leader.
“He made himself the symbol of the underdog, projected himself as somebody who is against the status quo forces.”
The times came to suit Modi. When popular disgust at corruption scandals plaguing the previous Congress government boiled over into street protests in 2011, it provided the rightwing populist leader a national springboard.
“Modi was at the forefront of projecting this strong, centralising leadership,” said Milan Vaishnav, the director of the south Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He realised what people are looking for is somebody who gets stuff done.”
His mastery of political theatre, and finger on the pulse of Indians, has now secured him the strongest mandate of any leader in decades.
But it will do little to create jobs, alleviate financial stress in the country’s vast agriculture sector or grow the economy on the backdrop of a US trade war and a global slowdown.
“Issues of economy will be the focus of his first 100 days,” said Rajat Sethi, a fellow at the influential BJP-aligned India Foundation thinktank.
He said Modi could also look to broaden a programme of targeted payments to farmers and other struggling groups.
The scale of Thursday’s victory creates room for Modi to ram through reforms, but also the possibility that he may not have to, said Gilles Verniers, a political scientist who teaches at Haryana state’s Ashoka University.
“It is a peculiar result because there were a multitude of ground realities that were clearly going against the BJP. It won despite jobless growth, rural distress, a tepid economy,” said Verniers. “It’s as if all those adverse factors did not matter at all.
“And so the worry is that it could translate into a belief the the BJP can win despite poor performance, and that may not not necessarily translate into incentives to address the deeper issues with the economy.”
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