TO MARK Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday on Wednesday, and to celebrate him turning 75, BJP units and governments across the country have announced a series of plans.
The Varanasi Municipal Corporation has announced that it will inaugurate and lay the foundation stone of projects worth Rs 111 crore. The municipal body will also cut a 75-kg cake, Varanasi Mayor Ashok Tiwari said Tuesday. Modi is the MP from the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat.
The Delhi government – the BJP returned to power in the Capital earlier this year after more than 25 years – will launch 500 creches for children of women working as labourers in the city. In Maharashtra, where there is a BJP-led government tpp, party president Ravindra Chavan has announced more than one lakh cataract surgeries over a fortnight-long drive.
Modi himself will be in Madhya Pradesh, also a BJP-ruled state, to inaugurate the ‘Seva Pakhwada’ or ‘service fortnight’, which the party has made an annual feature around his birthday.
During his Madhya Pradesh visit, Modi will also launch a ‘Swasth Nari Sashakt Parivar Abhiyan’, at Bhainsola village in Dhar district, as part of which camps will be organised for the health and nutrition of women.
Ten years of celebrations
On his first birthday as PM in 2014, when Modi turned 64, he went to Ahmedabad to meet his mother Hiraben. That year, he had requested party workers not to celebrate the day and instead contribute to relief efforts in Jammu and Kashmir, as it was recovering from floods.
On Modi’s 65th birthday in 2015, over a year after the Swachh Bharat campaign was rolled out, cleanliness was the focus.
In 2016, Modi was again in Gujarat on his birthday to meet his mother. Meanwhile, across the country, the BJP organised blood donation camps, cleanliness drives and charity events. In Delhi, then Union Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu cut a 500-kg laddoo at an event organised by Sulabh International to mark the day.
In 2017, while the PM made a trip to Hiraben, the BJP observed ‘Seva Diwas’ across the country, with party leaders attending medical camps, blood donation events, and taking part in cleanliness drives.
On September 17, 2018, his last birthday before the following Lok Sabha elections, Modi celebrated the day in Varanasi and interacted with students.
In 2019, after a meeting with his mother, the PM visited the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Kevadiya, Gujarat, and addressed a public rally. This was just a month after the abrogation of Article 370, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and the topic figured prominently in his speech.
The fact that he chose the site, which also hosts a grand statue of Vallabhbhai Patel, for the rally was also significant – the BJP credits Patel with “unifying India”, with J&K’s “full integration” seen as an unfinished ambition of the late Congress stalwart.
The Ahmedabad District Education Department, on its part, marked the PM’s birthday by asking government, grant-in-aid and self-financed secondary and higher secondary schools to arrange special lectures, group discussions; debates, essays and elocution competitions; and other similar contests on the subject of Article 370 during their assembly that day.
In 2020, on Modi’s 70th birthday, blood donation camps, meetings and camps to distribute food were held at 70 different places.
The year 2021 marked Modi’s uninterrupted “20 years’ run in public office” – as designated by the BJP, counting his tenure as Gujarat Chief Minister starting in 2001 – and the celebration was accordingly ramped up. Events were held across three weeks, including the distribution of 14 crore ration bags with Modi’s photo, five crore “Thank-you Modiji” postcards mailed from booths nationwide, and 71 spots where river clean-ups were held.
This was right after the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India and, coinciding with September 17, over two crore Covid-19 vaccine doses were administered to beneficiaries.
That year, the Union Ministry of Culture joined the celebrations with an e-auction of gifts and mementos received by the PM. On the block were as many as 1,300 items, which included the javelin thrown by Neeraj Chopra for his Olympic gold medal, sports gear and equipment of other medal-winning Olympians and Paralympians, a replica of the Ayodhya Ram Mandir presented by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and a wooden replica of the Chardham given by the Uttarakhand government.
In 2022, as the PM turned 72, the ruling party arranged blood donation camps and outreach programmes. Then, seven decades after they became extinct in India, eight cheetahs from Namibia were released into an enclosure at the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh by Modi himself.
In 2023, with the countdown to the next Lok Sabha elections starting, Modi was again in Varanasi – this time to launch ‘Vishwakarma Yojana’ to enhance the “skilling” of craftsmen and artisans. Infrastructure projects including an India International Convention and Expo Centre and the extension of the Delhi Airport Express Line were also launched.
In 2024, having returned to power for the third time in a row, Modi chose Odisha for his birthday visit. The BJP had formed its first government on its own in the state earlier that year.
The PM interacted with beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, laid foundation stones for projects as well as inaugurated development projects worth more than Rs 3,800 crore in Bhubaneswar. He also launched the Subhadra Yojana, the Odisha government’s scheme to transfer Rs 10,000 per year to eligible women beneficiaries in the state between the ages of 21 and 60.