Lucknow resident Abhinandan Pathak was merrily cycling down a street in the Uttar Pradesh capital one day in September 2013, when he was suddenly mobbed by a group of people. “It’s Modi,” they exclaimed, rushing to get a closer look at him.

Narendra Modi had just been nominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party as its prime ministerial candidate — and the crowd around Pathak was convinced that the BJP leader was in their town, riding a cycle. Some whipped out their phones to take pictures, others jumped in to shake his hand. It was all strangely exhilarating, Pathak thought.

Five years later, he is still revelling in the fact that he looks uncannily like the Prime Minister. And once a diehard Modi fan, he is campaigning against the BJP these days. “ BJP bhagao, desh bachao ,” he says.

Pathak insists he has a role to play that goes beyond merely posing for pictures in a Modi avatar — complete with dark glasses and a cropped grey beard. “I’m not just a lookalike; I also have a background in politics. I have a vision for this country,” he tells BL ink , speaking on the phone from Raipur, Chhattisgarh, where he was campaigning for the Congress ahead of the state elections.

Pathak (55) says he has always been interested in politics. He claims to have contested as an independent Lok Sabha candidate from Saharanpur — the west UP city where he was born and raised — after LK Advani began his rath yatra. His name, however, doesn’t figure in the list of candidates who fought for the seat in 1991.

What he doesn’t bring up now is that after Modi swept to power in 2014, he saw himself as an extension of the Prime Minister. He called himself “Nandan Modi” and campaigned for the BJP for the Delhi assembly elections. However, in the 2017 UP assembly elections, he wanted to contest from Varanasi on a Republican Party of India (Athawale) ticket. But he was disqualified, Pathak says.

With the media training its cameras on him, Pathak’s Lucknow home, where he lives with his three daughters, has become a durbar of sorts.

“People think if they can’t meet the real Modi, they might as well meet the lookalike,” he says. So, they have been knocking on his door and voicing their concerns.

Pathak says the anger he sees against the ruling party cannot be ignored any longer. Last month, he reached the conclusion that if he has to put his energies anywhere it is in fighting against the BJP.

Meanwhile, with chai expenses soaring in the Pathak household, he needed a source of income. “My daughters began to worry about how we could sustain spending so much on sugar and tea leaves to make a hundred cups a day for all the visitors coming to see me,” he says. That’s when Pathak took his engagement outside.

He has been campaigning for the Congress for the Assembly polls in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. “I realised that I needed to support the party that was a friend of the common man,” says Pathak. He speaks in chaste Hindi and says he did a “double Master’s” in the language from Allahabad.

Expenses for food, local travel and stay are often handled by the Congress Party, he says. But he claims he funds his own long-distance travels, aided by donations from well-wishers, his mother’s pension (she’s a retired headmistress) and his paltry earnings from conducting religious talks and wedding ceremonies.

He holds no official position in the party but his presence has created quite a stir among the masses at public meetings and rallies. And, seemingly, not just among the masses. Pathak claims that when Congress party president Rahul Gandhi spotted him in Raipur a week ago, he stopped his convoy and got out of the car to give Pathak a hug.

“I was thrilled when Rahul ji asked everybody to move aside so he could click a selfie with me. He even posted it on Instagram,” Pathak gushes.

On Monday, when PM Modi was campaigning for his party at a gram sabha in Bilaspur, Pathak and his team arranged for a nukkad sabha — a street corner meeting — half a kilometre away. “It was Modi versus Modi. One was showing the other his place by mentioning the disgraceful act of the PM’s silence on [corruption allegations against] CM Raman Singh’s son named in the Panama papers,” says Sanjay Goswami, Pathak’s aide.

If Pathak is to be believed, he pays a heavy price for looking like Modi. In the days after demonetisation, people grabbed him by his shirt and abused him for banning currency notes. Some people ask him when they would get the ₹15 lakh that Modi had promised the electorate before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. “The anger is real. I see it every day being directed at me,” he says.

But why does he want to take the wrath of the people? He could simply shave off the beard. “But why should I? I am the original. He is the lookalike!” he retorts.

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