Narendra Modi’s Love for Wildlife Photography: A Lesser-Known Hobby

A camera in one hand, a jeep rolling slowly through dry forest, and a wild Asiatic lion just metres away. That was the scene on World Wildlife Day in early March 2025, when Modi visited Gujarat’s Gir National Park and posted his own photographs of lions and lionesses from the safari, captioned simply that he’d “tried his hand at some photography.”

It wasn’t a one-off photo op. Modi’s connection to Gir and to wildlife photography as a personal interest goes back years, tied closely to the region he governed for over a decade as Chief Minister, long before any of this played out in front of a national and international audience.

Why Gir Specifically

Gir Forest, in Gujarat, is the only place on Earth where wild Asiatic lions still survive outside captivity. Their population had once fallen to critically low numbers, and conservation efforts, many of them running through Modi’s years as Gujarat’s Chief Minister and continuing after, have helped the population recover substantially over recent decades.

Modi has repeatedly used his own visits to Gir, including ones where he’s picked up a camera himself, to draw public attention to that conservation story. On World Lion Day and World Wildlife Day observances in recent years, he has posted about rising lion numbers in the region alongside his own photographs from safaris there.

Not Just a Publicity Exercise

It would be easy to write this off as a scripted moment for a head of government, and there’s certainly a public relations angle to any Prime Minister posting wildlife photos from a state safari. But the pattern goes back further and more consistently than a single visit would suggest, spanning multiple trips to Gir across different years and stretching back to well before his time as Prime Minister, when he was still Gujarat’s Chief Minister and had far less reason to stage a global photo opportunity.

He has also personally chaired meetings of India’s National Board for Wildlife, most recently convening one in Gujarat in early 2025, putting conservation policy discussions in the same visits where the photography happens, rather than treating the hobby and the governance work as separate tracks.

The Conservation Numbers Behind the Photos

The story he’s been photographing is a genuine conservation success. Gujarat’s Asiatic lion population stood at 674 in the 2020 census. By the most recent count, that number had climbed to 891, a jump of roughly 37 percent in five years, driven by habitat protection efforts, anti-poaching work, and community coexistence programmes around Gir. It’s a rare wildlife story in India that’s moving in the right direction, and it gives Modi’s photography hobby a genuine news hook beyond the novelty of a Prime Minister behind a camera.

Wildlife Photography as Soft Diplomacy

There’s also a quieter benefit to this hobby that’s easy to miss. A world leader photographing lions in their natural habitat is a fairly disarming, apolitical image, one that travels well internationally without carrying the baggage that follows most of his other public appearances. It’s one of the few recurring public moments where Modi appears simply as an enthusiast with a camera, rather than as a partisan figure making an argument.

Beyond Lions: The Cheetah Project

Lions aren’t the only big cats tied to Modi’s public interest in wildlife. On September 17, 2022, his own 72nd birthday, Modi personally released cheetahs brought from Namibia into a specially built enclosure at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, marking the reintroduction of the species to India roughly seven decades after cheetahs were declared extinct in the country. The project has continued since, with a second generation of cubs born at Kuno reported by late 2025, a sign the reintroduction has moved past its earliest, most fragile phase.

Unlike the Gir lion visits, which draw on decades of personal and gubernatorial history with the region, the cheetah project was a newer, more deliberately staged initiative timed to a symbolic date. Both, though, point to the same underlying pattern: wildlife conservation as a recurring, hands-on interest rather than an occasional talking point.

Bottom Line

Modi’s wildlife photography isn’t a manufactured hobby invented for social media. It traces back through years of visits to Gir specifically, tied to a conservation story he has been personally associated with since his time as Gujarat’s Chief Minister. Whether or not every safari photo is a deliberate messaging choice, the underlying interest in the region’s lions, and in wildlife conservation more broadly, shows up consistently enough across the years to be treated as more than a passing photo opportunity.

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Abhyudaya Verma