How a bal swayamsevak from Nagpur won, lost, then reclaimed his state

Mumbai/Nagpur: Devendra Fadnavis burst on Maharashtra’s political stage between 2012-2014 with his regular exposés of the alleged irrigation scam where he targeted Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal and Sunil Tatkare of the Nationalist Congress Party which was then in power with the Congress.

Fadnavis’s hammering of corruption allegations, including on Adarsh, was so effective that it became a national talking point and was one of the key factors in the eventual ouster of the UPA government in 2014.

On Thursday, Fadnavis, 54, will take oath as Maharashtra’s chief minister for the third time, and by his side, taking oath as his deputy, will be Ajit Pawar.

Nagpur man Fadnavis’s rise as one of the most powerful leaders in the state has been both meteoric and fraught. His father Gangadhar Fadnavis, an old Jan Sanghi, was a member of the legislative council who had been arrested during Emergency. The young Fadnavis, then just seven years old, was so riled by the arrest that he opted out of his convent school because it was named after prime minister Indira Gandhi and took admission is Saraswati Vidyalaya in Nagpur’s Shankar Nagar instead. Besides his late father, his aunt Shobhatai, a lawmaker from Chandrapur, was the other seminal influence on him.

“Devendra was from the Dharam peth shakha of the RSS. He and his brother Ashish joined when they were young boys and they would attend the RSS’s winter camp at Khapri religiously,” says senior RSS activist Avinash Sangwai. He recalls that while older activists like him had to supervise the bal swayamsevkas, “Devendra, even though young himself, would do our job; his leadership qualities manifest even then.” The precocity became further evident when Fadnavis became a corporator of the Nagpur municipal corporation at age 22, and the city’s mayor at 27.

In 1999, he was elected member of the legislative assembly from Nagpur west which he represented twice before moving to contest from Nagpur south-west from where he has won another four terms. Sanjay Joshi, former national general secretary (organization) of the BJP, said Fadnavis had been hand-picked and groomed by the RSS from an early age. “His commitment to ideology and to caring for everyone regardless of caste, creed or religion, was instilled in him at an early age.”

Gopinath Munde’s death in a car accident in 2014 just as the BJP was on an upsurge created a sudden leadership vacuum in Maharashtra BJP. When Narendra Modi swept to power only days later, he turned to his “young friend Devendra” to assume the party’s state leadership. But even as the biggest opportunity of his career opened up for Fadnavis so did the chinks in his armour. The BJP had appointed a team of Eknath Khadse, Sudhir Mungantiwar, Vinod Tawde, Pankaja Munde and Fadnavis to lead the party in the Assembly elections slated for a few months later. The party also decided to contest independent of its ally the Shiv Sena for the first time.

But when the results came, it fell short of a simple majority by 23, and contemplated taking outside support from the NCP before patching up with the Shiv Sena. But that first break from its ideological partner, and the gradual side-lining of Khadse, Tawde and Munde were all attributed to Fadnavis’s overweening ambition.

In his first term as CM, he brought a freshness and youthful energy to the office of chief minister initiating a slew of key infra projects for the state including metro lines for Mumbai and the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Mahamarg to boost rural economy. His government offered massive loan waivers to farmers and created a rural irrigation mechanism for Marathwada under a scheme called the Jal Yukta Shivar. But suspicions that he would brook no impediment on his way to the top persisted. His ill-conceived attempt to form a government with a breakaway faction of the NCP led by Ajit Pawar in the early hours of October 23, 2019 marred Fadnavis’s image and goodwill. “Me Punha Yein” (I’ll be back), his cinematic line as he stepped down after 80 hours as CM, became the stuff of countless memes.

Back again on the opposition benches, Fadnavis turned out to be a formidable rival to the newly-minted MVA. He led a high-decibel campaign against alleged corruption during Covid, stoked conspiracy over Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide and put the MVA government on the backfoot with allegations that there was a threat to police informer Mansukh Hiren’s life hours before his body was found washed ashore. The entire botched-up case about gelatine sticks being found outside Mukesh Ambani’s house led to then Mumbai police commissioner making sensational claims of corruption against MVA home minister Anil Deshmukh who had to resign eventually. In March 2022, Fadnavis handed out pen drives on the floor of the House to lawmakers with 125 hours of audio recording that claimed to offer evidence of the MVA’s plot to trap opposition leaders like Girish Mahajan under concocted cases.

The playbook was familiar: a relentless attack on the government, only this time every allegation was amplified by an army on social media.

The attack on the MVA was as much overt as it was covert. In June 2022, Fadnavis was party to an extraordinary midnight coup that split the Shiv Sena and resulted in the fall of the 27-month MVA government. But in this moment of triumph, there was also a setback in store for him. Instead of Fadnavis taking over as chief minister, as widely expected, rebel Eknath Shinde was anointed CM, with Fadnavis being asked to serve as his deputy.

In the face of this apparent snub, Fadnavis relied on his old RSS training, choosing to keep his chin up and toe the party line. “He has a calm demeanour and composed temperament which allows him to bounce back without much hullabaloo,” said Sandip Joshi, a friend from his Nagpur days.

What lies ahead

The RSS training also meant that Fadnavis who participated in the 1992 Ram janmabhoomi agitation at Ayodhya, banned consumption and sale and transport of beef as one of his first decisions on taking charge as CM. In the recent Assembly elections, he ran a campaign that he called “Dharam Yudh” and raised the issue of “vote jihad” repeatedly. Fadnavis also cracked down on those he termed as “urban naxals” as part of the probe into the violence that broke out at Bhima-Koregaon on January 1, 2018. Activists, lawyers and academics were jailed as part of this crackdown. Six years on they await the start of the trial against them.

Fadnavis’s earliest challenges in his first term as CM was the sweep of the Maratha agitation. The seemingly leaderless-agitation briefly brought the state to a standstill with mammoth marches across Maharashtra. His government provisioned for 12 and 13% quota to the community in education and jobs respectively which was eventually scrapped by the Supreme Court in 2021. The Maratha demand for reservation which continues to simmer will remain one his biggest challenges upon his return as chief minister. And in this he will be pitted against Sharad Pawar who is thought to be one of the forces behind the rise of the Maratha leader Manoj Jarange-Patil. Pawar often needled Fadnavis, referring to his Brahmin roots, by invoking ‘Anaji Pant,’ the minister who conspired against Maratha kings Shivaji and Sambhaji.

In fact, Fadnavis who became the state’s second-youngest CM after Pawar, has often been compared to him for his acumen and political dexterity. Unlike Pawar though, Fadnavis can be less circumspect. At a public meeting ahead of the 2019 Assembly polls, Fadnavis had proclaimed that the Sharad Pawar era in the state “was over” only to be outfoxed when Pawar cobbled together the MVA. This battle for one-upmanship between the two, seems to have swung, for now at least, in Fadnavis’s favour. He not only broke Pawar’s party but also returns as chief minister to potentially complete a second 5-year stint as chief minister. Something that Pawar could not do.