Prime Minister Narendra Modi was back with his monthly radio address Mann Ki Baat on Sunday, his first after the poll victory, asserting that his pre-election promise to return with the broadcast reflected not overconfidence but his “trust” in the people.

“I had said (in the previous broadcast in February) that we would meet once again after three or four months, and people assigned a political hue to it, saying, ‘Hey, Modiji is so full of confidence, he is certain!’,” he said.

“The confidence was not Modi’s. This trust was the trust of your foundation…. That is why in the last episode of Mann Ki Baat then, I had effortlessly said that I would be back after a few months.”

Modi claimed he had not “returned” but had been “brought back” by the people.

Mann Ki Baat, aired on the last Sunday every month, is among various mediums the Prime Minister has been using to reach out to the people directly, drawing accusations of trying to gain a larger-than-life stature and remain in campaign mode.

In his February 24 broadcast he had promised to return on May 26, which many had construed as a sign of “overconfidence”. Modi missed the promised May 26 broadcast but was back on the last Sunday of June.

He began by saying he had “missed” the “sheer joy” of the radio programme in the “rigours of the elections”.

“For me, it was like experiencing a kind of void,” he said, adding that at 11am on the last Sunday of the month he would get “uneasy, with a nagging feeling of a kind of emptiness”.

“You too felt the same, didn’t you?” he asked. “I’m sure you did.”

Modi said many people had asked why he had travelled to Kedarnath (where he spent a night in a cave just before the last phase of polling). He said most people had drawn political conclusions from the visit but for him it was an opportunity to “meet myself”.

“I undertook the journey to meet my inner self. I shall not reveal more today but I certainly want to tell you that perhaps in that solitary cave, I got an opportunity to fill the vacuum caused by the long pause that Mann Ki Baat had to go through,” he said.

“The rest is your inquisitiveness…. I think, someday I’ll talk about that too. When, I can’t say, but I’ll do it for sure.”

Modi lauded the “unimaginable” selflessness of the common people, saying they tended not to seek anything for themselves from him.

“For Mann Ki Baat, I receive so many letters and telephone calls but there are hardly any elements of complaint. In the past five years, I haven’t come across any letter where someone demanded anything for themselves. Can you imagine such a thing? People writing letters to the Prime Minister, demanding nothing for themselves!”

He said more than 61 crore people had voted in the general election — a number greater than the population of any other country barring China, “almost double the population of America and more than the population of Europe”. That was the “sheer size and spread” of the country’s democracy, the Prime Minister said.