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

On Thursday, Fadnavis, 54, will take oath as Maharashtra’s chief minister for the third time -- and by his side, taking oath as his deputies will be former CM Eknath Shinde, and the leader Fadnavis once relentlessly targeted, Ajit Pawar.

Nagpur man Fadnavis’s rise as one of the most powerful leaders in the state, and consequently 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 Emergency. The young Fadnavis, then just eight years old, was so riled by the arrest that he opted out of his convent school because it was named after then 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.

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“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 Sangh 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 were 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 three times before moving to contest from Nagpur South-west, from where he has won another three terms. Sanjay Joshi, former national general secretary (organisation) of the BJP, said Fadnavis was handpicked 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.”

Entering the big league

Gopinath Munde’s death in a car accident in 2014 just as the BJP was on an upsurge created a sudden leadership vacuum in the party in Maharashtra. When Narendra Modi swept to power only days later, he turned to his “young friend Devendra” to assume the BJP’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 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, the fell short of a simple majority by 22 seats, and took outside support from the NCP for a month before patching up with the Shiv Sena. That first break from its 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 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 grid for Marthwada under a scheme called the Jal Yukta Shivar. But suspicions that he would brook no impediment on his way to the top persisted. In the 2019 assembly elections, the BJP and the Shiv Sena contested as a pre-poll alliance, but broke up soon after with the Sena demanding the top post. Fadnavis’s ill-conceived attempt to form a government with a breakaway faction of the NCP led by Ajit Pawar in the early hours of October 24, 2019 marred his image and eroded his 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 actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide, and put the MVA government on the back foot 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, secured allegedly by IPS officer Rashmi Shukla, that claimed to offer evidence of the MVA’s plot to trap opposition leaders like Girish Mahajan in 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 part to an extraordinary midnight coup that split the Shiv Sena and resulted in the fall of the 21-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 Sainik 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 , albeit, after initially refusing the deputy’s job. “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 in Ayodhya, banned consumption and sale and transport of beef as one of his first decisions on taking charge as CM in 2014. In the recent assembly elections, he ran a campaign that he called “Dharam Yudh” (holy war), 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 Sharad Pawar in YEAR, has often been compared to the latter in terms of his acumen and political dexterity. Unlike Pawar though, Fadnavis can be less circumspect. At a public meeting ahead of the 2019 assembly polls, Fadnavis 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 now swung in Fadnavis’s favour. He not only broke Pawar’s party but also returns as chief minister to potentially complete a second five-year stint as chief minister, something even Pawar could not do.