Why Prime Minister Modi will meditate at Kanyakumari’s Vivekananda Rock

In 1892, Swami Vivekananda swam to the rock off the southern tip of mainland India, and meditated for three days and nights.

Today, a memorial stands on the rock in which Swami Vivekananda meditated. (Wikimedia Commons)

4 min readNew DelhiJun 19, 2024 05:02 PM IST First published on: May 29, 2024 at 09:01 PM IST

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Tuesday (May 28) that he will visit and meditate at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, from May 30 to June 1 to mark the culmination of BJP’s Lok Sabha election campaign.

This marks a callback to his two-day visit to Uttarakhand’s Kedarnath shrine at the end of the 2019 election campaign, where he undertook a 15-hour-long ekantvaas (solitary meditation).

Here is what may be behind the prime minister’s decision to meditate in Kanyakumari.

The rock where Swami Vivekananda attained enlightenment

The Vivekananda Rock is a tiny rocky islet located some 500 metres from Kanyakumari’s Vavathurai beach, the southern tip of mainland India, at the confluence of the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is accessed via a 15-minute ferry service from Vavathurai.

In 1892, however, Swami Vivekananda, the revered Hindu philosopher-saint, swam from the shores of Kanyakumari to the rocky islet to meditate. His disciples believe that he meditated there for three days and three nights, and attained enlightenment. Swami Vivekananda had been wandering for four years across the length and breadth of India, and at Kanyakumari, finally formulated his philosophy

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As he wrote to Swami Ramkrishnananda (not to be confused with his guru, Sri Ramakrishna) in 1894: “At Cape Comorin sitting in Mother Kumari’s temple, sitting on the last bit of Indian rock, I hit upon a plan: We are so many Sannyasins wandering about, and teaching the people metaphysics — it is all madness. Did not our Gurudeva use to say, “An empty stomach is no good for religion?” That those poor people are leading the life of brutes is simply due to ignorance. We have for all ages been sucking their blood and trampling them underfoot” (as quoted in S P Agarwal’s The Social Role of Gita, 1993).

On the eve of Swami Vivekananda’s birth centenary in 1963, the Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee led by RSS activist Eknath Ranade made efforts to commemorate the site of his enlightenment. The memorial on the rock was formally inaugurated by the President V V Giri in 1970.

Behind the prime minister’s decision

Prime Minister Modi has long revered Swami Vivekananda as a role model. As a young man, he was even a member of the Ramakrishna Mission, a spiritual and philanthropic organisation founded by Swami Vivekananda.

Speaking at the Mission’s 125th anniversary celebrations last year, he had said, “Swami Vivekananda had a grand vision of India, and I am sure he is proudly watching India working to fulfil this vision”

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The selection of the Vivekananda Rock as the site for Prime Minister Modi’s meditative retreat also assumes significance in light of his pronounced push into the South during this year’s Lok Sabha campaign. Over a third of the prime minister’s trips to the South occurred in the last three years, with seven visits made to Tamil Nadu in 2024 alone.

The five southern states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka — account for 131 of 543 Lok Sabha seats. Tamil Nadu alone accounts for 39 seats in the Parliament. Prime Minister Modi has forecasted the emergence of the BJP as the single-largest party in the South. In an interview to PTI on May 20, he said: “We have already seen a jump in mind-share already, we will see a big jump in seat share and vote share for us in the region.”