How Modi's hometown has been transformed to 'pump up the cult' of India's PM

Namita Singh meets the prime minister's family and former friends where he was raised and discovers how Vadnagar is being changed to rewrite its place in the country's history

- Namita Singh

For one of the best-known political leaders in the world, Narendra Modi's backstory is remarkably shrouded in myth and mystery. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Vadnagar, the Indian prime minister’s hometown in the western state of Gujarat.

Modi has spent more than 30 years in public life – the last 10 as the domineering leader of a country of some 1.4 billion people – but most of what is known about his early years is a collection of contentious and sometimes contradictory stories that he and his admirers have told.

Speak with his relatives and old acquaintances in Vadnagar and they talk animatedly about the young man they once knew and their association with him, but there is barely any detail. They relate anecdotes about Modi the man that seem to echo the public persona he has assiduously crafted over the years, the story that has become the standard narrative of his approved biographies and public recollection.

Vadnagar, about 90km south of state capital Gandhinagar, was a small and nondescript town up until a decade ago when Modi won his first election as prime minister. Like most Indian small towns it had scant public infrastructure, even though Modi had been chief minister of Gujarat for 13 years.

Modi was inaugurated for a rare third consecutive term as prime minister yesterday, and Vadnagar is now a bustling township with better roads, a decent railway station, and music festivals. The chief attractions, though, are the places associated with Vadnagar’s most famous son. There is the temple Modi prayed in, the school he went to, the Sharmistha lake where he supposedly swam as a boy and, of course, the now famous railway platform where he is said to have sold tea with his father.

Vadnagar was put on Unesco’s tentative world heritage sites list in 2022, and the substantial facelift it has received since, Modi’s critics say, is designed to assign it a place in India’s history as the birthplace of a great leader.