AT DAWN on June 21st more than 35,000 Indians, from portly civil servants to skinny schoolchildren, embarked on a synchronised, 35-minute display of yoga in central New Delhi. It was an impressive turnout for a Sunday morning but perhaps not surprising. Leading the movements was Prime Minister Narendra Modi who, since convincing the UN in December to designate an International Day of Yoga, pushed the event mercilessly. Memorandums were sent to civil servants warning them that if they failed to take their asanas seriously they risked jeopardising a longed-for entry in the Guinness Book of Records. Across India, schoolchildren have been practising the upward-facing dog for weeks. The foreign ministry has flown yoga teachers to many of the 192 countries taking part. For a leader with a lengthy programme of economic reforms upon which he has barely embarked, Mr Modi’s focus on his mega-yoga party might require some explanation. The event invited charges of something worse than whimsy. Muslim activists complained that the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP)’s promotion of yoga, which has its roots in the ancient religious practices that were gathered up into Hinduism, is an expression of Hindutva, an ideology which sees India as an exclusively Hindu nation. A Muslim group has filed a case against the northern state of Rajasthan for requiring students to attend yoga sessions. Indian Muslims have grounds for sensitivity. Yoga has long been used for political ends in India: its movements and chants are part of the daily drills of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the hard-line Hindu group in which Mr Modi started his career. RSS members have been implicated in communal violence against Muslims in India, including pogroms in the state of Gujarat in 2002. As its chief minister at the time, Mr Modi failed to prevent the violence, for which America refused him a visa.

So it is difficult not to see Mr Modi's championing of yoga as an expression of Hindutva, albeit of a watered-down version. Since he came to power last year, Mr Modi has learned to repackage his political Hinduism in a form that is palatable to the world. For hard-line members of the RSS and BJP, his yoga enthusiasm reminds them that the prime minister is still one of them. But that is not the only purpose it serves. Promoting yoga is how Mr Modi has chosen to express his concern for the health of Indians, who are increasingly overweight. He has set up a ministry for yoga, ayurveda and other traditional medicines (as well as homeopathy), and introduced free classes for public servants. For the police they are mandatory.

But Mr Modi is also using yoga to brand India and himself to the world. The practice, which is enjoying a global boom, is popularly associated with vague ideas of peace and health; Mr Modi wants to remind the world where it all began. Announcing the plans for Yoga Day, his foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj—who attended Yoga Day celebrations with the UN's secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York—described yoga as "the best soft power India has". Having practised it for much of his life, Mr Modi has even set himself up as a global teacher: he provides his followers on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, with daily lessons on yoga poses.

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Yoga stretches up (November 2014)

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