UNJHA: As she savoured the prospect of her brother Narendra becoming India’s prime minister, Vasantiben Modi chortled at the idea that a one-time tea boy would soon be calling the shots over Delhi’s traditional elite.

“They can’t believe it, can’t believe that someone from such a simple background could beat them,” Vasantiben said from her modest two-storey home, close to the town in Gujarat where the siblings grew up.

Results on Friday showed Modi’s Hindu nationalist party and its allies headed for a landslide win over the secular Congress party that has ruled India for all but 13 years of its history as an independent nation.

Congress’s election frontman was Rahul Gandhi, the latest in a bloodline which has already provided three of India’s prime ministers.

But while Rahul’s childhood was spent playing in the peaceful back garden of his grandmother Indira Gandhi’s official residence, the young Modi would often help his father serve tea on a suburban train station platform — when not volunteering for a hardline Hindu youth movement.

While the urbane Rahul was educated at Oxford and Harvard universities, the abrasive Modi was on a spiritual voyage of discovery in the Himalayas after walking away from a child marriage arranged by his parents.

Published in Dawn, May 17th, 2014