Narendra Modi claims the programme will showcase India’s ‘beautiful mountains and mighty rivers’, in the latest in a string of choreographed media appearances

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, will appear with Bear Grylls in a wilderness survival television programme, the latest in a series of Putin-style media appearances in which the 68-year-old leader projects himself as a man of action and a champion of the environment.

A trailer for the programme, Man vs Wild, which will air in India on 12 August, shows the two men cutting through forests, sniffing animal dung and floating down a river on a makeshift raft. In one scene, Modi holds an improvised spear and tells Grylls: “I’ll hold this for you.”

The programme is the latest of Modi’s choreographed media appearances where the strongman leader casts himself as the a symbol of masculinity, strength and robust health – a pitch that appeals to his party’s nationalist voter base.

“He is the alpha-male. He will not lose even a single opportunity to project himself as the man with the 56-inch chest,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of a biography on Modi, referring to a claim Modi made on his campaign trail in 2014.

In recent months, Modi has bolstered that superhuman image – appearing in images that show him meditating in a Himalayan cave and doing early morning yoga exercises. “He wants to be seen as the biggest and most popular globally-accepted political leader from India ever. He wants to have iconic status globally.”

Play Video 1:49 Stretch, bend and flex: Indian PM releases fitness video

Promoting the trailer for the programme, Modi tweeted: “India – where you find lush green forests, diverse wildlife, beautiful mountains and mighty rivers. Watching this programme will make you want to visit different parts of India and add to discourse of environmental conservation.”

The programme previously caused controversy in India after the Indian Express reported that Modi was likely to have been filming with Bear Grylls on the day of a terror attack in the disputed region of Kashmir, when extremists from neighbouring Pakistan killed dozens of Indian armed security personnel and almost prompted military conflict.

Narendra Modi: from impoverished tea seller to master of political theatre Read more

Some reports suggest Modi delayed taking action after the attack because he was in the wilderness filming with Grylls, but this has not been confirmed. “We know how important it was to him to feature in this show,” Mukhopadhyay said.

The appearance with Bear Grylls will also bolster Modi’s image as a protector of India’s environment.

Profile Narendra Modi Show Hide 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

Photograph: Adnan Abidi/X90166

Bhavreen Kandhari, an Extinction Rebellion activist in India, said Modi’s pro-business, pro-development government contributes to India’s environmental destruction. She ridiculed the UN’s decision to award Modi the title of Champion of the Earth in 2018. “I am standing in the most polluted city in the world,” she said, speaking over the phone from New Delhi.

“My children’s lungs are black. There is no day when I don’t get calls about trees being cut down. There is absolute devastation.”

Modi’s government has made international commitments to increasing India’s solar power production, but has also given the green light to controversial mining and infrastructure projects that will result in deforestation and environmental issues.

In June, images from a giant landfill site went viral after it was reported that a mountain of garbage was set to climb higher than the Taj Mahal.

On Monday, as he announced the results of a tiger census, which showed the number of Bengal tigers in the wild had risen, Modi said: “I feel it is possible to strike a healthy balance between development and environment. Our country is one where for thousands of years there have been teachings of co-existence [with nature].”