As the protracted national elections came to an end on Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a final pitch to his Hindu support base while meditating on a rocky outcrop off the coast of India.
It is widely anticipated that Modi would secure a third term when the polling is over, largely because of his well-cultivated persona as an assertive defender of the nation’s majority religion.
Despite India’s secular constitution, during Modi’s ten years in office, the leader has emphasized his religious credentials by going on frequent fasts, meditations, and trips to temples.
For his most recent ceremony, the 73-year-old came late on Thursday at a monument honoring the well-known Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda, who lived in the 19th century.
Images released by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Modi, showed the premier sitting cross-legged, closing his eyes, and holding prayer beads in one arm.
According to local media sources, the two-day meditation, which ends on Saturday on the last day of voting in the general election, is being guarded by over 2,000 police and security officers at the location in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Shortly before winning his most recent election in 2019, Modi experienced a similar retreat during which he sat in a cave in the foothills of the Himalayas for many days.
This year, he oversaw the opening of a stately temple dedicated to the god Ram, which was constructed on the site of a centuries-old mosque in Ayodhya that was destroyed in 1992 by radical Hindus.
Hindu campaigners had long demanded the temple be built, and when it was, it was widely honored with street celebrations and back-to-back television coverage across the nation.
This year’s election, which is spread over six weeks to lessen the enormous logistical strain of organizing the democratic exercise in the most populous country on earth, is widely predicted to be won by the BJP and Modi.
