VARANASI, India — Shortly after dawn in the village square here each day, two dozen boys and men dress up in crisply laundered khaki shorts and fall into military-style formation behind a saffron-colored flag, brandishing bamboo sticks as if they were rifles.

They spend the next hour performing highly structured drills that interweave physical training with religious indoctrination, ending with 108 repetitions of the chant “Ram Ram,” which refers to a Hindu deity, and a song whose refrain is, “The nation should awaken.” This is a local branch of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an ideological organization whose fortunes have ebbed and flowed for decades with the influence of Hindu nationalists in New Delhi.

With India’s national election campaign in its final stages, the R.S.S. has thrown its weight behind Narendra Modi, who has been active in the group since childhood and is now the front-runner for prime minister, India’s highest office. The group’s leaders describe the current voter-turnout drive as the biggest mobilization since 1977, when R.S.S. workers went door to door encouraging people to vote against Indira Gandhi, sometimes going so far as to wheel them to the polls on manual tricycles.

These activists count Mr. Modi as one of their own and see in him a chance to move long-cherished goals to the top of the national agenda. For years, they have sought a rollback of laws and programs tailored to India’s Muslims, the opening of Kashmiri property to buyers from other parts of India, and the redrafting of public school textbooks, among other goals.

As a candidate, Mr. Modi has made economic growth and development his central theme, building a vast electoral base that includes moderates and minority groups. He has pushed traditional Hindu-right projects to the margins of his campaign, and canvassers from the R.S.S. and its affiliates have avoided controversial subjects, limiting themselves mainly to exhortations to vote.

But in interviews, many expressed certainty that, with the election over, Mr. Modi would take action on a religious and cultural agenda.

“We can all see it now, that it is happening — that the awakening is happening,” said Praveen Rai, 38, who leads the morning drills here in Varanasi, one of India’s spiritual capitals. “Political churning is not very important for us,” he added. “What we believe is that we are the most advanced race in the entire world. We will convert the whole world into the Aryan race: So we have decided. We believe that Indian culture has been the best civilization in the world.”

Mr. Modi has practical reasons to distance himself from the Hindu right wing. His campaign, which has won the support of large corporations, has focused on a pledge to attract investment and manufacturing, a goal that demands domestic stability and collides with the R.S.S.’s protectionist tradition. He is known as an independent decision-maker who, in 12 years as leader of the state of Gujarat, regularly resisted attempts by R.S.S. leaders to influence him, journalists who covered his tenure say.

Asked last month about the R.S.S.’s muscular assistance, Arun Jaitley, a top official in Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, dismissed the notion that the group would have a place in a postelection government.

“People who do have a lot of ideological affinity to us have been extremely active and helpful in this campaign, not so much as organizations but as individuals,” Mr. Jaitley said. “As far as governance is concerned, we have been in power as a political party, and I can assure you we take our own decisions.”

Ambiguity has long surrounded the R.S.S. It was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, an independence campaigner who had split from the Indian National Congress party over what he considered “undue pampering of the Muslims,” according to “R.S.S.: A Vision in Action,” published by the group in 1988. Its central ritual and recruiting tool is the morning drill, known as the daily shakha, which was designed to “create an all-Bharat national consciousness.”

The Indian government banned the R.S.S. for 17 months in 1948 after a man associated with the group assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, and for brief periods in the 1970s and 1990s. Its opponents say it fuels religious conflict. For many years, the group has maintained that it has no involvement in Indian politics, saying its mission is focused on character-building. But many of its members have gone on to become candidates for the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose spokeswoman recently referred to the R.S.S. as the party’s “ideological fountainhead.”

“The B.J.P. and the R.S.S. are married to each other,” said Dilip Deodhar, an analyst whose family has been active in the R.S.S. for generations. “The power is there, but it is like that of a mother over her children. The mother does not use it for anything but the child’s welfare. There is no abusing it.”

The current campaign has thrust the group into an unusually public role. In October, the R.S.S.’s leader, Mohan Bhagwat, ordered the group and its affiliates to press for 100 percent voter turnout, according to Ram Madhav, a spokesman for the organization. Last week in Varanasi, an intense electoral battleground, some 5,000 R.S.S. volunteers were circulating — nearly as many as the 6,000 sent out by the B.J.P., according to Ashok Pandey, a B.J.P. spokesman.

Pramod Kumar — an R.S.S. propagandist, based in Varanasi — praised Mr. Bhagwat’s order.

“It was a very good feeling — that we were going backwards; the country’s religion, integrity and culture was on the back foot; and that we are going to set it straight,” he said. “Ever since I was born, I have been waiting for good things to happen in this country. Most definitely, that moment is here.”

Asked what changes he hoped to see after the election, Mr. Kumar reeled off a laundry list. He began by saying that Wendy Doniger’s book “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” recently withdrawn from publication in India, “should not be out in the Western press.” He called for an overhaul of government textbooks, which he said included insulting language about Hindu gods and excessive praise of the Muslim emperor Akbar. He also said he expected the reconstruction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, on a spot where a 16th-century mosque once stood.

“It’s deep inside of our hearts, the Ram temple, and it’s on — 75 percent of the work is done,” Mr. Kumar said, adding that he did not mind the B.J.P.’s decision to soft-pedal the issue in its election manifesto. “I can just fold my hands and quietly say the temple must be built, or someone can make a big hue and cry about it. It makes no difference. The temple must be built. It’s normal. It will happen after the election.”

In the meantime, the R.S.S. has provided many of the same electoral advantages for the B.J.P. as megachurches in the American heartland do for candidates: a highly disciplined and structured canvassing force, and village-level networks of contacts.Others, however, were irritated. “It is with a lot of slyness that the B.J.P. has included this only on the last page,” said Praveen Kumar Chaubey, 24, a volunteer with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, a student group affiliated with the R.S.S. “I feel it has been pushed down because they don’t want to hurt the sentiments of certain groups. Our sentiment is that it should be a magnificent reconstruction of the temple, and we are there.”

Ashwani, 29, an R.S.S. propagandist, was going door to door in the village of Baburi on Monday. When one of his subordinates mentioned a divisive subject — the lifting of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which grants Kashmir a degree of autonomy — Ashwani chided him.

“Our biggest theme is the politics of development,” he said. “I’ll give you an example. If the road is built properly, a Muslim will walk on it, a Sikh will walk on it and a Hindu will walk on it. If electricity is flowing, a Muslim can use it, a Sikh can use it and a Hindu can use it.”

Modi fever seemed to have taken hold in the village. In the narrow street, where storefronts offered piles of iced pomegranates and fired earthen pots, a stereo blared a delirious pop tune whose lyrics were “Har har Modi,” a slogan that echoes Hindu prayer. “This is Modi’s tea — you must have it,” one shopkeeper said exuberantly, thrusting a clay into a visitor’s hand.

A Muslim shopkeeper across the street watched, stone-faced. When asked about Mr. Modi, the shopkeeper, who refused to give his name, referred to bloody religious riots that broke out under Mr. Modi’s watch in 2002. “Do you think we are going to vote for the murderer?” he asked.

Ashwani did not hear that exchange, because he was chatting on the phone with an acquaintance who was interested in joining the R.S.S. Hanging up, he said he expected the organization’s membership to surge in the coming years. “Society is with the Sangh,” he said.