Devendra Fadnavis dominated the Maharashtra political stage with his regular “exposes” of alleged corruption in irrigation projects between 2009 and 2014, targeting Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal and Sunil Tatkare of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), who were then Were in power in partnership. Congress.
Fadnavis’s attack on corruption charges, including Mumbai’s Adarsh apartments, was so effective that it became a national talking point, and one of the factors in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s eventual ouster from power in 2014. Emerged.
On Thursday, Fadnavis, 54, will be sworn in as Maharashtra chief minister for the third time – and next to him, sworn in as his deputy will be former CM Eknath Shinde, and leader Fadnavis once frequently targeted, Ajit Pawar.
Nagpur man Fadnavis’ rise to power in the state, and consequently as one of the most powerful leaders in the country, has been both meteoric and fraught. His father Gangadhar Fadnavis, an old Jan Sangh loyalist, was a Legislative Council member who was arrested during the Emergency. Young Fadnavis, who was only eight years old at the time, was so enraged by the arrest that he left his convent school because it was named after then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and instead entered Saraswati Vidyalaya in Shankar Nagar, Nagpur. Took. Apart from his late father, his aunt Shobhatai, who was the MLA from Chandrapur, was another seminal influence on him.
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“Devendra was from the Dharam Peth branch of the RSS. He and his brother Ashish joined when they were little boys and they used to religiously attend the RSS winter camp in Khapri,” says senior Sangh worker Avinash Sangvai. He recalls that while older workers like him had to supervise the child volunteers, “Devendra, though young himself, would do our work; His leadership qualities were evident even then.” This haste became more evident when Fadnavis became a councilor of Nagpur Municipal Corporation at the age of 22 and mayor of the city at the age of 27.
In 1999, he was elected Member of the Legislative Assembly from Nagpur West, which he represented three times, before contesting from Nagpur South-West, from where he won three more times. Former BJP national general secretary (organisation) Sanjay Joshi said that Fadnavis was selected and groomed by the RSS from an early age. “His commitment to the ideology and caring for all regardless of caste, creed or religion was instilled in him at an early age.”
enter the big league
When the BJP was in turmoil after the death of Gopinath Munde in a car accident in 2014, there was a sudden leadership vacuum in the party in Maharashtra. When Narendra Modi came to power just days later, he turned to his “young friend Devendra” to take over the state leadership of the BJP. But as soon as the biggest opportunity of his career opened for Fadnavis, there was a chink in his armour. The BJP appointed a team of Eknath Khadse, Sudhir Mungantiwar, Vinod Tawde, Pankaja Munde and Fadnavis to lead the party in the assembly elections to be held in a few months. The party also decided for the first time to break away from its ally Shiv Sena and contest the elections independently.
But when the results came, she fell 22 seats short of a simple majority and took outside support from the NCP for a month before striking a deal with the Shiv Sena. The first alienation from his ideological partner, and the gradual sidelining of Khadse, Tawde and Munde, were all attributed to Fadnavis’s ambition.
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In his first term as Chief Minister, he brought freshness and youthful energy to the Chief Minister’s office by initiating several major infrastructure projects for the state, including metro lines for Mumbai and the Mumbai-Nagpur Samriddhi Mahamarg to boost the rural economy. His government offered large-scale loan waivers to farmers and created a rural irrigation grid for Marathwada under a scheme called Jal Yukt Shivar. But the doubt remained that he would face no obstacles on his way to the top. In the 2019 assembly elections, BJP and Shiv Sena contested the elections as a pre-poll alliance, but the alliance soon fell apart with the Sena demanding the top post. Fadnavis’s misguided attempt to form government with a breakaway faction of the Ajit Pawar-led NCP in the early hours of October 24, 2019, tarnished his image and destroyed his goodwill. “Me Punha Yein” (I will come back), his cinematic line while leaving office after 80 hours as Chief Minister, became the subject of countless memes.
Once again on the opposition benches, Fadnavis became a formidable opponent for the newly formed MVA. He led a high-decibel campaign against alleged corruption during Covid, created a conspiracy theory over the suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, and brought the MVA government on the backfoot by alleging that police informer Mansukh Hiren’s body was found hours before His life was in danger. Washed up on the shore. The whole fiasco of gelatin sticks being found outside Mukesh Ambani’s house led to the then Mumbai Police Commissioner making sensational claims of corruption against MVA Home Minister Anil Deshmukh, who ultimately had to resign. In March 2022, Fadnavis handed over to MPs on the floor of the House a pen drive containing 125 hours of audio recordings, allegedly secured by IPS officer Rashmi Shukla, which contained evidence of an MVA conspiracy to frame opposition leaders like Girish Mahajan. It was claimed to present. cases.
The playbook was familiar: relentless attacks on the government, only this time every allegation was amplified by an army on social media.
The attack on MVA was as overt as it was covert. In June 2022, Fadnavis was part of an extraordinary midnight coup that split the Shiv Sena and resulted in the fall of the 21-month-old MVA government. But in this moment of victory there was also a setback for him. Instead of Fadnavis taking over as chief minister, as was widely expected, rebel soldier Eknath Shinde was appointed chief minister, with Fadnavis asked to serve as his deputy chief minister.
In the face of this apparent disdain, Fadnavis relied on his old RSS training, and despite initially being refused the deputy’s job, decided to toe the party line. Sandeep Joshi, a friend from his Nagpur days, said, “His demeanor is calm and his nature is calm, which allows him to make a comeback without any fanfare.”
what lies ahead
The RSS training also meant that Fadnavis, who took part in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in Ayodhya in 1992, took action against beef consumption, sale and transportation as one of his first decisions after taking charge as CM in 2014. Was banned. In the recent assembly elections, he had participated. He called that campaign “Dharma Yudh” (holy war), and repeatedly raised the issue of “vote jihad”. As part of the investigation into the Bhima-Koregaon violence on January 1, 2018, Fadnavis also took action against what he termed “urban Naxalites”. As part of this action, activists, lawyers and academics were put in jail. For six years he has been waiting for the case against him to begin.
Fadnavis’s first challenge in his first term as Chief Minister was to control the Maratha movement. The seemingly leaderless movement brought the state to a brief standstill with massive marches across Maharashtra. His government had made provisions for 12% and 13% quota for the community in education and jobs respectively, which were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court in 2021. The Maratha demand for reservation, which continues to persist, will remain one of their biggest challenges upon their return. Chief Minister. And in this he will face Sharad Pawar, who is considered one of the forces behind the rise of Maratha leader Manoj Jarange-Patil. Pawar often took aim at Fadnavis, citing his Brahmin roots and minister Anaji Pant, who conspired against Maratha king Shivaji and Sambhaji.
Actually, Fadnavis became the second youngest CM of the state after Sharad Pawar. YearHe is often compared to the latter in terms of his acumen and political adeptness. However, unlike Pawar, Fadnavis may be less cautious. At a public meeting ahead of the 2019 assembly elections, Fadnavis declared that the Sharad Pawar era was “over” in the state, but was left stunned when Pawar held the MVA together. This battle for supremacy between the two now seems to be going in favor of Fadnavis. He not only broke Pawar’s party, but also returned as chief minister to potentially serve a second five-year term, which even Pawar could not do.
