Narendra Modi is on the cover of TIME this week in South Asia, available to subscribers here. Modi is the most polarizing politician in India, rarely gives interviews and is a possible future prime minister, but it bears repeating that putting Modi on the cover is not an endorsement. Researching and eventually interviewing Modi was, however, fascinating, and yielded several surprises.

The road to his office in Gandhinagar, a smooth, featureless four-lane highway, held the first one: Modi ordered the demolition of about 120 small Hindu shrines to make room for it, despite vehement objections from his Hindu nationalist allies. Modi may be portrayed as an ideologue, but he is more complicated than that. “He’s the only leader in the country who would be able to destroy a temple and get away with it, and still be called acceptable in Hindu politics,” says Tridip Suhrud, a social scientist based in Ahmedabad.
I first met Virendra Mhaiskar, CEO of the road building company IRB, for example, while researching a story on infrastructure in India. “Mr. Modi is looked upon with different lenses in different parts of the world,” Mhaiskar told me. He recalled submitting a $42 million bid to complete a section of Ahmedabad’s excellent bus rapid-transit system. The entire bidding process was done online — no cups of tea with mid-level bureaucrats, no photo-ops with local politicians. “Even today, I don’t know who the mayor is,” he says.
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