On the morning of 3 April, Abhinandan Pathak stepped off his sleeper compartment at Lucknow’s Charbagh Station. A posse of five men, including his 14-year-old son, Shivam, accompanied him. He wore white trousers and a white kurta, a gold Nehru vest, and a turban and neck sash coloured saffron and green—the colours of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
His silver hair and beard, and a pair of rimless spectacles, rounded off Pathak’s imitation of the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi.
Pathak is a physical education teacher from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, who has taken three months off from work to travel around India and campaign in support of the man he resembles, and whom he thinks should lead the country. “My first journey to campaign for Modi was by bicycle from Saharanpur to Meerut on January 27,” he said proudly when I met him at the station.
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