Global Courant
When President Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, take their place on the red carpet at the White House on Thursday to welcome India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there will be a kind of asymmetry in the perfect setting.
Mr Modi is going to bachelorette party.
While a family-oriented image is often a political selling point in the United States, in India many top leaders — including the prime minister — are proudly unattached, making a statement that no other union can come between them and the nation. .
Work life balance? Not for politicians in the world’s largest democracy, who stay busy meeting the needs of 1.4 billion people and compete with each other in their declarations of sleep deprivation. (Mr Modi clocks only four hours of sleep per night, his aides say.)
“Every moment of my time, every pore of my body, is only for my compatriots,” the prime minister said in 2019 after winning re-election.
India may seem like a strange place for expressions of solitary political commitment. Here, the family takes care of itself and arranged marriages keep families strung together. Dynastic families remain important in politics: according to almost a third of new MPs, a family member has held an electoral position or a prominent party position. a study.
But in a country weary of official corruption, with legislators enriching themselves and their families and ensuring their children’s political futures, many voters have come to believe that single politicians are less likely to steal.
“The very strong perception,” said Ajoy Bose, a journalist and author, “is that they have no personal interest. That they belong to the people.”
Many young Indians are under great pressure to get married. However, politically and spiritually, “a single person is not considered selfish, but someone who has made a sacrifice and is looked up to as a god or goddess,” Bose said.
Prominent in the group of unmarried politicians are Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress party, and Mamata Banerjee, the top politician in the state of West Bengal and a strong opponent of Mr Modi. (She would get even less sleep, just three hours a night.)
Others include Naveen Patnaik, the powerful chief minister of Odisha state; Yogi Adityanath, the Hindu monk who heads India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and is seen as a potential successor to Mr Modi; and Mayawati, the leader of one of the largest political organizations for lower caste Indians. (Mr Bose, who wrote a biography of Ms Mayawati, said she would hold important meetings in her bedroom and greet bureaucrats in her nightgown.)
Before them, of course, was Mohandas K. Gandhi, who, after being forced into an arranged marriage at the age of 13, gave birth to four children swore off sex in his thirties and delved into gaining India’s independence from Britain.
However, no one in the current cohort has leveraged singlehood more effectively than Mr Modi, said Neerja Chowdhury, a political commentator and editor.
“His team has carefully created that image. Whether on the steps of the plane, or at the inauguration of an underpass, or sitting on a bullet train, you will only find Mr Modi in the frame,’ said Ms Chowdhury. “The political message is: ‘I’m here for you. I will take care of things.’”
Today, Mr. Modi, 72, lives by himself in the prime minister’s sprawling residence, his work appearing to be the totality of his existence. But his life story is not so simple.
When he was a teenager, he left an arranged marriage and wandered the Himalayas in search of spiritual meaning. He rose in a right-wing Hindu organization and became a minister.
In the early 2000s, when he was running for state office, he left a blank on an election questionnaire asking about his marital status. It wasn’t until his first run for prime minister, in 2014, that he revealed that he had been married and had always portrayed himself as unattached.
He is believed to have never lived with his wife. He said in an interview with a Bollywood actor in 2019 that he “detached” from his family at a young age and learned “to leave behind all the pleasures of life.”
Many voters have been influenced by Mr Modi’s carefully constructed image – an image of an incorruptible leader who is also a kind of spiritual guru, detached from the demands of family and marriage.
“For Modi-ji,” said Parneet Ghuman, the owner of a fleet of taxis in New Delhi, “the land is his family.”
Mr Modi played this idea himself.
“I have no family ties,” he said at an election rally in 2014. “Who would I try to help through corruption?”
Some Indians have been inspired by Mr Modi to remain firm and determined as well. Among them is Sandhya Leima, who works with an organization in northeastern India that goes door-to-door to promote the prime minister’s government programs.
“I’m hitting 40 and staying single,” she said. “Like Mr Modi, I want to be able to dedicate my life to the country.”
