One by one, the dignitaries rose to recount Ramdev’s extraordinary career: how he brought physical fitness to the Indian middle class with his mass yoga camps and television empire how he built his medicine-and-consumer-goods company, Patanjali Ayurved, into a multibillion-dollar colossus. The crowd raised their arms and pumped their fists as they chanted the words - “India my motherland is great” - that have become a defining slogan of the Hindu nationalist movement. Everyone repeat after me: “ Bharat mata ki jai!” he shouted. Ramdev took the microphone and introduced the phalanx of several hundred Hindu religious students, known as brahmacharis, sitting in neat rows on the field. This was Baba Ramdev, one of the most famous men in India. At the center of a makeshift stage, surrounded by smiling politicians and cabinet members, was the person whose life was being celebrated: a slender figure in saffron robes with a long, dark beard, his chest-length hair tied in a bun. The men had come for a different kind of spectacle - a biographical film epic, whose initial episodes (out of 57 total) would be shown for the first time that evening. On a hazy day in early February, some of the most powerful men in India’s government gathered at Chhatrasal Stadium in New Delhi, an arena famous for its boisterous wrestling bouts.
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