The boy who once sold tea at a railway station has become the most influential Indian leader in generations, winning a landslide in the 2019 elections. Or so goes the story that has become the core of Narendra Modi’s extraordinary appeal.

Modi was born in 1958 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.

Hindu nationalists were sidelined by India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose vision of India was of a secular nation at ease with its bewildering plurality. Their parties, including Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), struggled to win more than 10% of the national vote for decades until the 1990s, when they started to expand on the back of a national campaign to demolish a 16th-century Mughal mosque and replace it with a Hindu temple.

BJP’s support was limited to wealthier Hindus in the country’s north and west, with resistance to the party from poor, marginalised Hindus, Muslims and south Indians thought to be permanent hurdles to Hindu nationalist domination.

Modi’s magnetism, especially his personal branding as a tea boy who climbed to the country’s highest ranks, has changed those calculations, drawing vast support from the country’s emerging middle and lower-middle classes. Young Indians had grown up being told their country was on the cusp of becoming a superpower. In Modi they had a leader who spoke as if it already was.

Alongside aspiration, the BJP promotes a vision of Hindu cultural supremacy that sidelines the country’s 300m minority population. As chief minister of Gujarat state, Modi was a firebrand Hindutva campaigner. In 2002, anti-Muslim riots in his state killed at least 1,000 people, resulting in the future prime minister becoming an international pariah who was banned from entering the US.

In response, Modi presented himself as an outsider being attacked by elites: a refrain that would become a central part of his political messaging, that he was constantly being targeted by the English-speaking media out of Delhi.

When popular disgust at corruption scandals plaguing the previous Congress government boiled over into street protests in 2011, it provided the rightwing populist leader a national springboard. His mastery of political theatre, and finger on the pulse of Indians, has now secured him the strongest mandate of any leader in decades.

Michael Safi in Delhi

