“Earlier, our people used to get up before sunrise and sleep before sunset, but now our lifestyle has changed. They are going to the pub, they will go in the middle of the night, at 12 or 1, and eat chicken and many, many new dishes,” said Mr. Naik, who, like the prime minister, rises before dawn and practices yoga daily. He recommends going to sleep by 9 p.m., gets his news from the Hindi-language press and proudly declares that he has never had an injection.

“There will be a lifestyle change,” he said. “Our style will come.”

Mr. Modi is not the first Indian leader to promote yoga. Indira Gandhi was so devoted to her yoga instructor, Dhirendra Brahmachari, that he accompanied her family when it traveled and became known as the “flying guru.” In the late 1970s, Mr. Brahmachari hosted a weekly television show, and yoga was included in some school curriculums. But after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, his influence waned, and he withdrew behind the walls of his ashram.

Mr. Modi has no guru of that importance, but since the 1980s, he has consulted regularly with H. R. Nagendra, a Bangalore guru who focuses his practice on achieving samadhi, a state of profound meditative absorption. Mr. Nagendra said Mr. Modi drew from the thinking of various popular teachers, including the gurus Baba Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Jaggi Vasudev and Mata Amritanandamay.

The strains of yoga arising now are, in many cases, intermingled with Hindu nationalist thought. Sun salutations and Sanskrit chants are part of the daily, military-style drills of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the right-wing Hindu group that started Mr. Modi on his political career. The daily shakhas, as the drills are known, were designed to “create an all-Bharat national consciousness.” Bharat is the Hindi name for India.

Mr. Nagendra, the nephew of a prominent R.S.S. leader, says his techniques have sent cancer into remission in 350 cases, weaned thousands of asthma patients off medications and treated psychiatric disorders, as well as homosexuality.

“It is the extreme stress that takes place, the stressful life, the wrong lifestyle, which makes them go for homosexuality,” he said. “We work to reduce the craving at the deeper levels. Once you do that, your desire to have sex or excessive sexual indulgence is gone.”

At events, Mr. Modi often shares the dais with Baba Ramdev, who presides over an ayurvedic medical empire and has preached against influences he describes as foreign, among them the English language, chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Mr. Naik, the yoga minister, himself learned yoga through the R.S.S., and he said he hoped that the widespread practice of yoga would lower rates of violent crime.