Prime Minister Narendra Modi filed his nomination for the 2024 Lok Sabha election from Uttar Pradesh's Varanasi Tuesday morning - after a six km roadshow on Monday evening - accompanied by a phalanx of senior leaders from the BJP and its alliance partners, including party boss JP Nadda, home minister Amit Shah and defence minister Rajnath Singh, as well as Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde and his Meghalaya counterpart Conrad Sangma. According to Modi's affidavit, he owns moveable assets worth £302,000, possesses Rs 52,920 in cash and does not own land, house or car.
The affidavit further shows that PM Modi's taxable income doubled from Rs 11,00,000 in fiscal year 2018-19 to Rs 23,50,000 in 2022-23.
Alliance partners present included Rashtriya Lok Dal chief Jayant Chaudhary and Lok Janshakti Party leader Chirag Paswan, as well as Apna Dal (Sonelal) boss Anupriya Patel and the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party's Om Prakash Rajbhar.
In the morning, en route to filing his papers, Modi prayed at the city's iconic Dashashwamedh Ghat, on the banks of the Ganges, with UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath present, and visited the Kaal Bhairav Temple. Before visiting the temple he said, "My relationship with my Kashi is amazing, inseparable, and incomparable... it cannot be expressed in words!"
On Monday, after his roadshow, the Prime Minister said, "The love and blessings my family members of Kashi showed during the road show became an unforgettable moment in my life."
Modi is seeking a third consecutive term from the BJP bastion; the party has won this seat eight times since 1991, with only RK Mishra of the Congress, in 2004, managing to break the stranglehold.
Varanasi will vote in the seventh and final phase of this election - on June 1. In the 2019 poll Modi won by nearly 480,000 votes, a big jump from the 372,000 winning margin five years earlier.
