NEW DELHI — Watching Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the past month as he began to carve out an image for himself beyond India’s borders, one might have had the impression that Mohandas Gandhi was his ideological progenitor or running mate.

Gandhi is everywhere in Delhi these days. A stylised drawing of his steel-rimmed, circular glasses is the logo of Mr Modi’s new cleanliness drive, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, introduced with great fanfare on the anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. He is posed with a broom and basket on the cover of Organiser, the magazine of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the right-wing Hindu organisation connected to Mr Modi’s party.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited, Mr Modi received him at Gandhi’s ashram. Then Mr Modi visited President Barack Obama in the United States and presented him with a copy of Gandhi’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita.

Gandhi, of course, is an unlikely avatar for the ascendant right wing in India. For most of the past century, Gandhi has been the symbolic leader of the Indian National Congress party, which Mr Modi drove from power this year. Gandhi’s economic vision was fundamentally anti-capitalist: He extolled rural over urban life and called industrialisation a curse for mankind.

During his lifetime, Gandhi was excoriated by right-wing activists — including the man who assassinated him — for acquiescing to the creation of Pakistan and advocating the rights of India’s Muslim minority.

Though Mr Modi has always spoken of Gandhi with respect, he has echoed the criticism that Congress leaders gave preferential treatment to India’s minorities. Mr Modi’s reputation as a Hindu hardliner was defined in 2002, when bloody sectarian riots broke out under his watch as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. No Indian court has found him responsible for the riots, which left more than 1,200 dead, most of them Muslims.

So the Gandhi now embraced by Mr Modi is an edited version. First and foremost, he is a preacher of cleanliness — a fair depiction, since he was passionate on the subject, known for seizing brooms and for insisting that even high-born followers, such as his wife, empty their own chamber pots.

Mr Modi has endorsed some elements of Gandhi’s economic thinking, urging consumers to buy homespun cloth, instead of imported products. But his Gandhi hardly believes that the future of India lies in its villages. To a prosperous crowd of mainly Indian-Americans at Madison Square Garden in New York last month, Mr Modi described Gandhi as a character remarkably like them: A man who went abroad, became a barrister, had opportunities, but came back to serve the nation.

Mr Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of the independence leader, has watched this process from his home in Mumbai with curiosity and, at times, satisfaction. However, he noted that during his 12 years as a state leader, Mr Modi had never invoked Gandhi with such enthusiasm. “In this short period of 100 days that he has been the Prime Minister of India, it seems everything he does is guided by Bapu,” he said, using an affectionate term meaning father. “It is a bit of a surprise. The only thing I can say at the moment is, I hope it is sincere.”

While preparing to seek the post of Prime Minister, Mr Modi set out to create political space for himself outside the Hindu right wing, in part by laying claim to beloved figures associated with the Congress party.

The most obvious was the independence fighter Sardar Patel, known as the Iron Man of India, whom Mr Modi so admires that he has begun a project to build a Patel monument tall enough for recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records. There is little mystery in why Mr Modi identifies with Patel. He was a rival to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and unlike the secular, Anglophile Nehru, Patel was an ascetic Hindu, far less sympathetic to the demands of India’s Muslims and more to the right on economic matters.

However, outside India, Patel’s name provokes only a dive for an encyclopedia, whereas Gandhi’s prompts hushed reverence.

More surprising, perhaps, is Mr Modi’s effort to associate himself with Nehru, a leader whom he has publicly criticised in the past as weak. Last week, Mr Modi called him Chacha Nehru, or Uncle Nehru, and proposed that his Nov 14 birthday become a nationwide celebration of — you guessed it — hygiene and cleanliness.

With the adoption of Nehru, Mr Modi has “got the whole packet” of Congress’ heroes, said Mr Shiv Visvanathan, a social scientist and self-described liberal. “Congress is left with very little,” he said. “It’s literally a stealing of intellectual property.”

Mr Tushar Gandhi declared last week that Mr Modi’s roll-out of the cleanliness campaign, which required top officials to go out and clean neighbourhoods, was the only celebration in decades that “would have gotten Bapu’s seal of approval”.

THE NEW YORK TIMES