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For Narendra Modi, the man who will be India's next prime minister, it has been a remarkable journey to the top during which he has been pilloried by his critics and adored by his supporters who believe he will pull India out of the rut.
"I believe God has chosen me," Modi had said in the course of his relentless and focused election campaign that has catapulted him to the pinnacle of power.
The 63-year-old BJP leader himself saw a combination of a very strong anti-Congress wave "together with an equally strong wave for BJP and its NDA partners" during the marathon campaign and seized upon these to decimate the UPA.
Dismissing charges of being authoritarian, Modi told PTI during the campaign that he believed in team work and that those who worked with him believed that he was strong-willed and decisive.
He accsued his opponents of resorting to "vague, non-specific and subjective things like saying that I am authoritarian, jingoistic, divisive". There had never been any serious allegation of corruption, nepotism or incompetence against him, he said.
A rank outsider to the 'Delhi club', the Gujarat Chief Minister, steamrolled all opposition within and outside to secure for BJP a majority that no party could get after Rajiv Gandhi's '400 plus' victory in 1984.
On the victory path, Modi virtually blanked out all others in the party and became its sole face in a long campaign that started last summer after he was made the campaign chief in Goa.
