Ostracised after the Godhra riots of 2002, the newly minted PM of the world’s largest democracy is the man other leaders are seeking out this week

For a decade, Narendra Modi was an international political pariah.



What publicity the chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat could attract outside his homeland was only ever condemnatory, and his political career, barely begun, appeared on the verge of oblivion. The US refused to grant him a visa, and it was made clear he was unwelcome in Britain and Europe, who imposed diplomatic boycotts.

Modi was ostracised for his actions, or inactions, during the Godhra riots, sectarian violence that roiled across his state for a month in 2002 in which 1,000 or more people, largely Muslim, died.

As a neophyte chief minister, he was accused of allowing the riots to rage, even of actively fomenting the violence of Hindu vigilantes. Modi has always denied the allegations and none have ever been proven against him.

That he did not, or could not, stop people dying in the brutal communal bloodbath that seized his state is self-evident. Whatever else he may have done is likely lost forever in the conflicting “truths” of the time. That month has coloured all opinion of him since.

Once the outcast, Modi arrived at the G20 on Friday as the political rock star of the summit. As the newly minted prime minister of the largest democracy the world has ever known, the 64-year-old is the man the other leaders are seeking out this week.

Across three countries, Modi will meet the leaders of 40 countries during his 10 days out of India – at the east Asia summit and the G20.

But India’s political Lazarus is also one of the country’s most unlikely prime ministers. In a country of caste hierarchy and established social privilege, low-born Modi has risen, literally, from chaiwallah – a roadside tea vendor – to the most powerful man in the land. Famously ascetic, teetotal and vegetarian, he meditates, practises yoga and shuns the trappings of office.

Modi has cast himself as a self-made man, an aam admi – common man – in a country where privilege is keenly felt and tightly held. His political opponents, the Congress party, initially used his humble beginnings as a political weapon against him, deriding him as “the tea boy”.

Modi embraced the epithet. He cast himself the friend of the poor and endeared himself to an aspirational, Hindustan heartland disenchanted by a corrupt and self-interested political class.

The Congress, Modi’s counter-argument ran, were the born-to-rule elites, who lined their own pockets at the expense of the people. He was one of them, he told the people, he understood their problems, and only he cared enough to fix them.

It was a powerful narrative, and May’s election may have marked the death of Congress’s powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Ineffectively led by the family scion Rahul, the party that won India its independence was comprehensively swept aside by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party.

In office, Modi has been careful to cultivate that connection to his Hindu nationalist heartland. He speaks excellent English but is reluctant to. Instead he almost always chooses Hindi, the north Indian vernacular.

Language is intensely political in India and Modi’s choice of the people’s tongue is another subtle but carefully engineered signal to his base that he is one of them and not above them.

On Friday, at the Queensland University of Technology, he was invited to sign his name on a prototype agricultural robot. He chose, instead, to write a note in his mother tongue and the language he writes poetry in, Gujarati, penning: “The developing journey of humanity is a continuous stream of research.”

It was apt. For all his traditionalism, Modi has embraced technology. India’s mobile phone-enchanted youth follow him on Twitter – six million and counting – and he has even appeared as a hologram at a campaign rally.

Modi came to power on a platform of progress, of cleaning up India, figuratively and literally. He promised reform of India’s grubby political classes, starting with the country’s byzantine bureaucracy, oft-derided for its corruption and inefficiency but itself an immensely powerful institution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest What’s the point of the G20, anyway? Find out with our animation

Controversially, Modi has established an online system in which citizens can check which office workers, or babus, are at their desk working and which haven’t got to the office yet.

And he has insisted the country physically clean itself up, choosing Gandhi’s birthday to launch the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission, enjoining his countrymen to sweep, tidy and beautify parks, streets and public places.

Yet his cleanup hasn’t entirely succeeded. Twenty of Modi’s ministers – almost a third of his 66-member cabinet – now face criminal charges, including attempted murder, rape, waging war on the state, criminal intimidation and fraud. And there remain serious concerns about his style of governance.

For the decade he was chief minister of Gujarat, the western, entrepreneurial state surged at 10% growth a year, well ahead of the rest of the country. But the economic success story couldn’t mask the accusations that he was totalitarian and dictatorial – that he, however he could, crushed any political opposition, inside his party and out.

And the events of February 2002 will hang around his neck for as long as he remains in office, the caveat to whatever success he might achieve in his political career. India’s 180 million Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities remain unconvinced that the prime minister of India is their prime minister.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Modi arrives in Brisbane for the summit. Photograph: Patrick Hamilton/AFP/Getty Images

As he arrived in Australia on Friday, the American Justice Center filed a criminal complaint with the commonwealth director of public prosecution alleging Modi was guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide. The complaint will, almost certainly, not amount to a prosecution. But controversy will attend his every move in Australia.

But the Australian government judged the political wind on Modi earlier than most countries. During his period in the wilderness Australia remained one of his few friends in the west. He visited in 2004 and was always carefully cultivated as an ally. He is now repaying that faith.

Modi is the first Indian PM to visit Australia since Rajiv Gandhi came to see his great friend Bob Hawke in 1986. Beyond his G20 obligations, Modi will meet with Tony Abbott, address the Australian parliament and speak to the Indian diaspora and business leaders in Sydney and in Melbourne.

Other countries, sensing Modi’s imminent victory and accepting it when it happened, have since taken the realpolitikal option and dropped their opposition to him.

Whatever may have occurred at Godhra, Modi is the legitimate, democratically elected prime minister of India and a hugely powerful leader on the world stage. He is the man with whom other leaders must deal when they come to India, the man who will likely rule the emerging economic giant for a decade.

However unlikely it may once have seemed, Modi is one of the most popular figures at this G20. A leader others want to see, and be seen with.

• On 15 November 2014 this article was amended. A previous version incorrectly said Modi had attended the Apec summit.