‘All of you are Modi’: The making of the man reshaping India

The tea stall at the train station, where he worked as a boy helping his father, remains on the platform, drawing visitors curious about the leader. An illustrated poster in the lobby of a campus built around his former school—where teenagers are brought to be inspired as part of a leadership program—sums up his life in seven stages of transformation from “youth" to a “global leader."

The burnishing of Modi’s roots in the town of Vadnagar into something resembling legend reflects the way he has been able to build his legacy while reshaping the economic, political and cultural fabric of India over a decade in power. If Modi wins a third term—as he is widely expected to do—when the votes of the nation’s general election are counted on Tuesday, he will be poised to overwrite the legacy of India’s first leader and further his vision of turning India into an economic power that draws national pride from its Hindu past.

Over India’s lengthy national election, Modi has said that he and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are planning not for the next five years but for at least the next 20. A minister in his cabinet compared his outlook to those of other leaders who have reshaped their nations, such as Deng Xiaoping in China or Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore.

“These are the people who really thought that ‘this is my society, this is my country, I want to take it there,’" said Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of railways in the Modi government. “And you start working—you start galvanizing everybody in that direction."

For decades, Indians lived in a country that bore the imprint of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, an English-speaking Cambridge-educated member of India’s elite who forged newly independent India into a pluralistic democracy against extraordinary odds. Reassured by the pledges of independence leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, millions of Muslims stayed in India in 1947, when Partition created two nations from British-ruled India, rather than leaving for Pakistan, where Islam is the official religion.

Modi is from a different mold. One of six children, he grew up in more modest circumstances than Nehru, who was the son of an affluent lawyer. From his childhood, he was drawn to a secretive group that believes that Hindu culture defines Indian identity, a principle it calls on India’s Muslims and Christians to accept. The focus of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, on discipline and obedience, shaped Modi’s worldview and ideas about leadership.

“He believes that a leader has to be a good follower in the first place," said Urvish Kantharia, the author of a book on the prime minister, called “This is Narendra Modi," which Modi gave to visitors when he was a chief minister in Gujarat.

But first, the group offered him a path of escape from the conventional life his family charted for him.

A young Modi makes his escape

When Modi was first seeking to be prime minister in 2014, his election filings stunned India’s national political establishment: The politician, widely believed to be single, revealed he was married to a woman named Jashodaben, a retired schoolteacher in Gujarat.

A teenage Modi didn’t want to marry, according to people who knew him growing up and a biography. But he succumbed to pressure from his family to follow through on a match they had arranged. His father cried when Modi tried to resist the marriage, said Shamaldas M. Modi, a former classmate and cousin. The prospects of his younger siblings and cousins would be ruined, family members remonstrated with him.

Soon after the wedding, Modi packed a small shoulder bag and left town, his cousin said. Modi has said little about what he did then, except for the fact that he spent time in West Bengal and India’s Himalayan region, where gods and humans have long sought wisdom and inner peace, according to Hindu scriptures. Current and former officials say those years, when he retreated from the world, shaped him as a future leader.

“He is privileged to have spent some years in the pursuit of a different life. He couldn’t get it—that is different—but he was in some kind of a discovery," said Nripendra Misra, Modi’s principal secretary in his first term. The two men remain close.

In the Modi government’s second term, the prime minister entrusted Misra with a key Hindu nationalist project—overseeing the construction of a temple in the city of Ayodhya on a site that many Hindus believe to be the birthplace of the Hindu divinity Ram. A Hindu mob in 1992 tore down a mosque that previously stood there, and many Hindus believe that medieval Mughal troops in the 1500s built the mosque over a temple.

At the temple’s inauguration in January—which fulfilled a promise integral to the BJP’s rise—Modi was at the center of the religious rites, alongside the chief of the RSS.

The group, which was founded in 1925 for “national reconstruction," was banned briefly after the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a militant Hindu nationalist influenced by its ideology. Modi, born in 1950, encountered the organization when he was 8 years old, as many children in small towns across India have, and was drawn to its discipline. Youngsters attending the group’s gatherings at the time undertook exercise routines and heard exhortations to serve the motherland, at times donning an official uniform of khaki shorts and a cap. The organization’s senior leaders live simply and rarely marry, to devote themselves to the nation.

When Modi resurfaced from his travels, in his early 20s, he applied to become an RSS activist and the group’s state headquarters in the city of Ahmedabad became his home.

“The RSS gave him a sense of identity," said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a journalist who first met Modi three decades ago, and later interviewed him as chief minister several times for a biography. “It was also a kind of family he was embracing, leaving behind the family he was born in."

The group is deeply intertwined with Modi’s party. In 1987, RSS leaders tapped Modi to help build the relatively new BJP into a political force in the state.

Modi quickly became known for a relentless work ethic. He created a state media wing for the first time, said Yamal Vyas, now the BJP’s spokesman for the state. He trained young men answering the phone in the party’s office to greet callers as though they were at a company, “Namaste, you’ve reached the BJP."

During the 1995 state assembly elections, he called each of the party’s 182 candidates starting at 5 a.m. each day to ask what he could do to help their campaigns, according to Vyas. The party won a majority and formed a government without coalition partners—setting a template for Modi’s future electoral dominance in national polls.

The defining political crisis of his career came in 2002 when a fire on a train killed nearly 60 Hindu activists. Years later, courts in Gujarat found a group of Muslim men guilty of conspiring to start the fire. Hindu activists called for a strike. In that volatile atmosphere, mobs attacked Muslim neighborhoods and leaders, leaving at least 1,000 people dead, most of them Muslims.

In 2012, an investigative team answering to India’s Supreme Court said that it found no evidence of wrongdoing by Modi in connection with the riots. Modi has faced calls to express regret or apologize over the 2002 violence, which he hasn’t done. For years, he faced a U.S. visa ban over the violence under his watch, but it was dropped once he was elected prime minister. Modi has always denied any wrongdoing.

His office didn’t respond to detailed questions sent by email or grant a request for an interview.

As trials over the attacks and investigations into his actions made their way to India’s top court, Modi instead focused his efforts on fixing the state’s huge budget deficit, building roads and improving the power supply. In 2003, he hosted the first edition of Vibrant Gujarat, an investor summit. Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, one of India’s biggest conglomerates, was at the small inaugural event, where he announced plans to invest billions of dollars in the state.

Those efforts, which helped the state grow by more than 9% a year, on average, and which he promoted as the “Gujarat model," were key to rebuilding Modi’s global reputation and helping him become a national leader, according to political experts.

‘All of you are Modi’

When Modi took the stage this April in the city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, his appearance injected fresh energy into a crowd that had been wilting in the heat. Some climbed on chairs to take videos. Many raised placards with the slogan: “I am Modi’s family."

They chanted in a call and response: “One more time: Modi in power!"

If Modi wins a third consecutive majority for his party, he would become the first Indian leader since Nehru and his Indian National Congress party to do so, a testament to his personal popularity and ability to consolidate Hindu voters.

But as he pushes to reinvent what it means to be Indian, the country’s Muslims say they feel increasingly disenfranchised, and civil society groups, independent news outlets and political opponents say they have been targeted by government machinery. Several political scholars and think tanks rate India’s civil society as less free after a decade of Modi’s governance. For his part, Modi has defended his record on upholding democratic principles, including during his U.S. state visit last year, saying at the time that “Democracy is in our DNA."

In these elections—in which the party fielded only one Muslim among its hundreds of candidates—Modi, in one speech, referred to Muslims as “infiltrators" and “people who have more children." Political experts say that echoed language he used at times in 2002 in Gujarat.

Officials close to him say they expect Modi to return his attention to the economy and efforts to make India a manufacturing hub now that big-ticket elements of his platform for Hindu supporters have been completed. But Modi’s belief that pride in Hindu identity is the foundation of its economic rise will underpin his development philosophy. Modi has pointed to countries such as Japan as an example of a great power built on civilizational pride.

“He will very often tell you no country in the world which is run well has been able to do well by turning its back on its own civilizational past," said Hardeep Singh Puri, oil minister in the Modi government.

The prime minister has encouraged Indians to embrace his journey as their own. In Agra, he urged people to work not just with him—but as if they were him.

“For me, all of you are Modi," he said.

Write to Tripti Lahiri at tripti.lahiri@wsj.com, Rajesh Roy at rajesh.roy@wsj.com and Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel@wsj.com