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.
