International Yoga Day 2023: PM Modi to bend leaders into shape at UN today

Nine years ago, Modi successfully lobbied the UN to designate June 21 as International Yoga Day. Since then, he has harnessed yoga as a cultural soft power to stretch his nation’s diplomatic reach and flex his country’s rising place in the world.

New Delhi: Millions of Indians will take note today as Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads foreign dignitaries and bureaucrats in a session for International Yoga Day at the United Nations’ Secretariat in New York.

Yoga, an ancient discipline first practiced by Hindu sages, is now one of India’s most successful cultural exports after Bollywood. And it's become a piece of India's diplomacy. Nine years ago, Modi successfully lobbied the UN to designate June 21 as International Yoga Day. Since then, he has harnessed yoga as a cultural soft power to stretch his nation’s diplomatic reach and flex his country’s rising place in the world. Modi has promoted yoga so much that even foreign diplomats have been seen stretching themselves in gardens and their embassy offices.

Government bureaucrats and officers have taken to social media to show themselves folding in different poses and sometimes tiredly grabbing their backs after mass outdoor yoga sessions. The Indian military has done downward dog with trained K-9 units, boat pose atop an aircraft carrier and mountain pose in the high-altitude Himalayas in bone-chilling temperatures.

Modi has also been living la vida yoga, flexing his own hardcore devotion to the practice. In 2018 he posted a two-minute video on Twitter that showed him doing a range of yoga poses in a garden, including stretching and leaning backward on a rock in a spread-armed savasana that birthed many memes. In 2019, after the final day of national polling, he retreated to a Himalayan mountain cave to meditate and seek isolation — with a camera crew that relayed live visuals to the entire nation.

A year later, Modi went the extra mile, tweeting videos showing an animated version of him doing yoga poses. Now, Modi is guiding leaders from around the world in the practice of yoga to promote its benefits as part of his three-day visit to the U.S. Modi’s ministers, following their leader in practicing yoga, have sometimes marked it with religious connotations by doing sun salutations and chanting Sanskrit verses considered holy in Hinduism. (Agency inputs)