The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chose Narendra Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, as its candidate for the Lok Sabha constituency of Varanasi on Saturday, March 14, 2014. The decision to send sitting MP Murli Manohar Joshi to Kanpur was a brave one. When Modi got to the sacred city on April 24, 2014, he famously said in his first speech, “Nobody has sent me, nor have I come here, Mother Ganga has invited me to Kashi.”
Since that important moment, Prime Minister Modi has won the parliamentary seat three times, utilizing Varanasi as a base for a new kind of Hindutva combined with development politics. His work has helped the BJP become the most powerful party in Uttar Pradesh.
Varanasi has changed a lot in the last ten years. A new road from the city to the airport, a trade facilitation center, a perishable cargo center, and a port are only some of the big infrastructure projects that have been finished. The city’s looks have also been improved by putting cables underground to get rid of the tangled web of above wires and updating the Ganga aarti ceremony. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor is the most important part of this change. It has made it much easier to get to the holy shrine.
People who live there and political observers agree on how Modi’s time in office has affected things. A resident named Shashi Mishra remarked, “Kashi took in PM Modi and Modi made Kashi his home.” Shashi Kant Pandey, a political scientist, talked on the meaning behind his choice. “Varanasi… gave his candidacy a sense of cultural legitimacy.” Pandey said, “It was a way to combine Hindutva symbols with politics of development.”
Choosing Varanasi was a risky move. The seat was not a traditional BJP strength; in 2009, Murli Manohar Joshi won by only 17,000 votes against a strong local opponent. However, Modi’s candidacy set off a firestorm in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and his choice to keep the Varanasi seat over Vadodara in Gujarat, where he won by a far greater margin, sent a clear message. Pandey said that this choice was based on “pragmatic politics” to make the BJP stronger in an area where it had had trouble in the past.
As Prime Minister, Modi has always put his constituency first. He has been to Varanasi 52 times and opened projects worth more than ₹52,000 crore. The International Cooperation and Convention Centre, a central command and control center, and two cancer hospitals are also part of these plans. “The development projects helped change the city’s identity from a crumbling pilgrimage town to a showcase of Modi’s development model wrapped in cultural pride,” said Shatarudra Prakash, a former MP and Varanasi resident.
The city has also become a diplomatic center, hosting six foreign leaders since 2014, such as the then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the French President Emmanuel Macron, and the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. This year, Navin Ramgoolam, the Prime Minister of Mauritius, also went to Kashi.
Rajendra Kumar Gupta, a local business owner, appreciated the changes he could see, saying, “Cleanliness has gotten a lot better.” The ring road project is done, and the roads are fixed. It has made the city less crowded. These actions have strengthened Modi’s ties to the city and made it a crucial element of his political legacy.