Who is Narendra Modi, the reelected Prime Minister of India? Career, political views, family...
Narendra Modi, who was first elected Prime Minister of India in 2014, looks set to be the second to serve a third straight term after recent elections.
The six-week long 2024 general elections in the world’s largest democracy wrapped up on Saturday. Nearly 970 million voters of India’s more than 1.4 billion citizens had a chance to cast a ballot.
Counting began on Tuesday and initial results of the 47-day polling show that the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is projected to win. However, for the first time since coming to power a decade ago the BJP looks set to lose its outright majority.
Nonetheless, Modi will retain his hold on power thanks to the majority secured by the coalition his party belongs to, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which will make him the second in India’s history to serve three consecutive terms as PM.
But, the lackluster showing could be a sign that there is growing dissatisfaction with Modi, a popular but controversial figure, and he may have to adjust his style.
Who is Narendra Modi, the reelected Prime Minister of India? Career, political views, family...
Modi was born in 1950 in a small town in western Gujarat state to a low-caste family. His father was a tea seller. He has used his humble origins and outsider status as part of his persona to connect with the public. A good example of this is when he was insultingly referred to as ‘chaiwala’, or tea seller, by a member of the opposition when he ran for PM the first time. He used that to paint the Congress party as elitists and organized ‘chai pe charcha’, or ‘discussion on tea’ events.
As well, he portrays himself as a devout Hindu living a simple, ascetic lifestyle. At 73 he is single and has no children, although he was married but left his wife when he was 17.
Modi joined a right-wing paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as a young boy. The group advocates for Hindu hegemony in India and is the ideological parent of his party the BJP.
He came to political prominence in 2001 when he became the chief minister of his home state of Gujarat. Not long after there were anti-Muslim riots in which 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.
He was suspected of quietly supporting the aggression against the Muslim community but a Supreme Court-appointed panel in 2002 found no evidence. Still, the US revoked his visa in 2005 based on concerns that he failed to act to stop the communal violence.
Then, in 2014, Modi led his Hindu nationalist party to victory over the then-ruling Congress party in the general elections that year with the BJP taking 282 seats, an absolute majority, in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. He promised to jump start the economy with sweeping reforms which resonated with a public fed up with corruption.
He won reelection in a landslide victory in 2019 on the back of nationalist sentiment and with a more straight forward Hindu-first message.
During his time in office so far, he has been accused of stoking religious and ethnic divisions and eroding the nation’s democracy through strong-arm tactics. His critics say that Modi has worked to limit independent media and stifle dissent stacking the deck against the opposition.
For his supporters, he is credited with helping to grow India into the world’s fifth largest economy through his policies and improving welfare programs on which a majority of India’s citizen rely.