On 7 October, 2001, Narendra Modi first took the oath of office as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. The rest, as they say, is history!
Following his unanimous election as the head of the BJP legislative party, Gujarat’s CM-designate, Narendra Modi, received an invitation from the governor of the state to form the government.
After taking his maiden oath as Gujarat’s chief minister, Modi ended his speech with a stirring rendition of “Bharat Mata Ni Jay.”
He then left the stage amid cries of “Apanu Gujarat, Agavu Gujarat” and drove an open jeep into the crowd.
Given the declining health of Keshubhai Patel, he was appointed to be the Gujarat chief minister.
Immediately after taking office, Modi started interacting with the bureaucracy in his own tech-savvy way, holding video conferences with at least 10 collectors on the first day.
“‘Vadodara was my ‘karmabhoomi’. I see several familiar media persons sitting there.’ was the first reaction of Modi during a video-conference with officials of the Vadodara district administration. The wit and humour of a supposedly no-nonsense person came as a surprise to the audience here.” TOI stated.
Times of India stated that day, “Modi seemed to have done his homework well before speaking to the officials. While he admitted that the Gujarati spoken by him was heavily accented with Hindi due to his stay in Delhi his deliberations with the officials made evident that he had kept in touch with the late of affairs in Gujarat.”
Narendra Modi’s swearing-in event was also streamed live online.
Modi entered his first-ever election on the popular ballot nearly four months after taking the oath of office as Gujarat’s chief minister. After winning, he made his debut in the Gujarat Assembly.
Modi submitted his nomination for the Rajkot II seat in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly in January 2002.
With three terms as Gujarat’s chief minister from 2001 to 2014, Modi went on to hold the record for the longest tenure.
In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced Modi as its prime ministerial candidate and won 282 seats. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance won 386 seats out of the 543 total Lok Sabha seats.
After serving the state for a long period of time, he had resigned from the post of Chief Minister to become Prime Minister of India in 2014.
The BJP, under Modi, bettered its tally in the 2019 general election and secured 303 seats.