🇮🇳 Narendra Damodardas Modi

He was born in 1950 in Vadnagar, a small town in north Gujarat, the third of six children of Damodardas Mulchand Modi, a Modh Ghanchi tea-seller, and Hiraben. The family belonged to the Other Backward Classes and lived in a single-storey home with a kitchen, a verandah and a courtyard. As a teenager he helped at the family tea stall on the Vadnagar railway platform — a biographical detail he has invoked, accurately, in countless speeches. He joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist organisation, as a balswayamsevak at the age of eight.

He left home at seventeen and travelled for two years across northern India, visiting Hindu monasteries in the Himalayas and Belur Math in Calcutta. He returned to Gujarat in the early 1970s as a full-time RSS pracharak, took on increasing responsibility during the Emergency of 1975-77 organising underground anti-Indira Gandhi networks, and was deputed to the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1985. Through the 1990s he worked as the BJP's general secretary in Gujarat, mostly behind the scenes, and was credited with engineering the party's growth in the state.

He became Chief Minister of Gujarat in October 2001, replacing Keshubhai Patel. In February 2002, the Godhra train burning, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims died, and the subsequent communal riots in Gujarat killed more than a thousand people — the majority of them Muslims — and became the defining controversy of his career. A Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team in 2012 found no prosecutable evidence against him personally, a finding the court upheld in 2022; critics, including former police officers and bureaucrats, contested the finding. The United States denied him a diplomatic visa under the International Religious Freedom Act from 2005 until 2014.

As Chief Minister he was credited with a high-growth economic model — power-sector reform, Vibrant Gujarat summits drawing global investors, ports, expressways, and a Surat-Ahmedabad industrial corridor. He won three successive state elections, in 2002, 2007 and 2012. In 2013, the BJP named him the party's prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general election, against significant internal resistance from senior leader L. K. Advani.

The 2014 election gave the BJP a single-party majority in the Lok Sabha for the first time since 1984. He was sworn in as Prime Minister on 26 May 2014. His first term saw the launch of the Swachh Bharat sanitation drive, the Jan Dhan Yojana financial inclusion programme, Make in India, and demonetisation in November 2016, in which 86 per cent of currency in circulation was invalidated overnight. The second term, beginning in 2019 after another majority, saw the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, and a year-long farmer protest that was the largest in decades and eventually forced a repeal of three farm laws.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the rollout of the world's largest vaccination programme, the digital identity platform Aadhaar (initiated under the previous government but scaled under his) and the Unified Payments Interface have been associated with his administration's record. So have the prosecution of opposition leaders, the use of central agencies including the Enforcement Directorate and CBI against political rivals, the imprisonment of journalists and activists under the UAPA, and India's drop in the Reporters Without Borders press-freedom rankings from 140 in 2014 to 159 in 2024.

In the 2024 general election, the BJP fell short of an outright majority on its own — winning 240 seats against the previous 303 — but retained government through the National Democratic Alliance, with Modi taking oath for a third term on 9 June. He continues to live in 7 Lok Kalyan Marg, Delhi, working hours that aides describe as eighteen-hour days, with a vegetarian diet and a personal yoga routine. He remains the most-followed political leader on social media globally and the most polarising public figure in India.