ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Narendra Modi, in speeches delivered in Kachchh between 2007 and 2022, narrates his transformation from Sangh volunteer to Chief Minister of Gujarat, and later Prime Minister of India: from Kachchh disaster recovery success and Indian disaster diplomacy more widely to that of the world teacher, viśvaguru. We illustrate how the Kachchh earthquake recovery becomes a vehicle through which he transforms into a politician: the earthquake made who he is today. The success narrative of the 2001 earthquake is used as a vehicle for becoming viśvaguru, teacher of the world, and is parallelly used by international humanitarian organisations and civil society, and thus forms a strong case to advocate global disaster politics. Modi emerges, for the Kachchhi audiences, as the muscular father of development who establishes his soul (ātmā) to Mother India through the land of Gujarat. By speaking of Kachchhi people as Gujaratis, he thus offers a Hindu nationalist alternative for Kachchhis to move from the developmentalist periphery to that of economic and social prosperity, by invoking his development model as Kachchh model of development instead of Gujarat model of development as popularised earlier.
