Cut in the mould of PM Modi, CM Devendra Fadnavis is now a leader in his own right

Five years ago, Devendra Fadnavis was seen as an erudite legislator and nothing more. Now, he has carved out his own space and led his party to success.

File photo of Devendra Fadnavis | ThePrint

Mumbai: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems to be on its way to clinch a second term in Maharashtra, but its victory is bittersweet.

As the assembly election votes are being counted in the state, mid-day trends show the party leading in 104 seats — not just falling behind its target of surpassing the 2014 tally of 122 seats out of 288, but also unlikely to achieve its dream of establishing a single-party dominance in Maharashtra. It may also have to rely on ally Shiv Sena much more.

However, unlike after the 2014 election when there was a scramble over who will head the BJP-led government in Maharashtra, the question over leadership this time is unambiguous. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, the one leader who stood out for carrying the campaign on his shoulders, is likely to be back in the most elite cabin on the sixth floor of Mantralaya.

Until just five years ago, Fadnavis was seen as an erudite legislator, but otherwise a political and administrative greenhorn. That’s not the case anymore.

The Fadnavis touch

While opposition parties were still regrouping after their massive defeat in this year’s Lok Sabha elections, CM Devendra Fadnavis already hit the road from 1 August for a series of pre-campaign rallies titled the ‘Mahajanadesh yatra’, travelling 4,384 km across 150 of Maharashtra’s 288 assembly seats through September.

In the last leg of campaigning once the election dates were announced, Fadnavis addressed about 65 rallies across the state even after holding the yatra.

A BJP leader known to be close to Fadnavis said, “The ‘Mahajanadesh yatra’ created such a buzz that we actually didn’t even need an extensive campaign after elections were actually announced. Despite issues such as the recent floods in western Maharashtra and the farm crisis in parts of the state, people have still shown a lot of trust in Fadnavis.

“With this election, his political stature has surged not just in the state, but also amid the BJP central leadership.”

Besides being the face of the BJP’s campaign in Maharashtra, Fadnavis and his team of trusted aides such as Ketan Pathak and Nidhi Kamdar also ran the entire backroom management for this election, BJP leaders say.

“Right from brainstorming how an advertising campaign should be, and what the radio, television and hoarding ads should look like to deciding which BJP leader should be given what responsibility for the election, the CM was actively involved in every decision,” said a second party source.

A core team comprising Maharashtra BJP president Chandrakant Patil, party strategist Bhupendra Yadav and organisation secretary Vijay Puranik helped the CM, added the source.

Fadnavis had an evident imprint on the candidate selection too.

The party kept senior BJP leaders such as Vinod Tawde, Eknath Khadse, Prakash Mehta, Chandrashekhar Bawankule and Raj Purohit out of the poll fray. Fadnavis had an axe to grind with several of them.

Tawde and Khadse have been CM aspirants and were perceived as challengers to Fadnavis. Khadse had already been sidelined after he was made to quit following graft allegations against him in 2016. In his term’s last cabinet reshuffle earlier this year, Fadnavis had clipped Tawde’s wings by taking away a few of his portfolios, and dropped Mehta, who had been battling corruption charges.

Fadnavis is also credited for smoothening ties with BJP’s bittersweet ally Shiv Sena, getting it on board for the Lok Sabha elections and forging a seat-sharing pact heavily in the former’s favour for the assembly elections — all without antagonising Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray.

For the first time, the Shiv Sena accepted a smaller share of seats than the BJP without much open bickering.

However, like other senior leaders of the BJP such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Minister Amit Shah, Fadnavis too seems to have underestimated some amount of rural discontent against his government.

In line with the party’s national leadership, Fadnavis too peddled poll issues like the scrapping of Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir, which may not have cut much ice with rural Maharashtra voters who were concerned more about farm distress and unemployment.

As chief minister

Devendra Fadnavis’s tenure as chief minister began with a number of challenges — some of which like the Maratha agitation and trouble with ally Shiv Sena brewed to a boil. The CM, however, ensured that he turned the tide in his favour each time.

Caste emerged as a flashpoint for the Maharashtra administration with the Maratha agitation for reservation in jobs and education and the Bhima Koregaon violence, and Fadnavis’s Brahmin identity threatening to politically isolate him.

Fadnavis has been only the second Brahmin to occupy the top post in Maharashtra after Shiv Sena’s Manohar Joshi, who was the chief minister between 1995 and 1999.

These issues, however, never affected the BJP electorally as the party aggressively grew its footprint across the state — winning big in municipal council, corporation as well as zilla parishad elections, and ultimately repeating its strong performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha election too. In all these polls, it was Fadnavis who led the BJP from the front, addressing campaign rallies across Maharashtra.

“He has proved his political capability beyond doubt in these five years. He turned the Maratha agitation in the BJP’s favour, quietly ensured that he has more of his people on his cabinet and dealt astutely with the Shiv Sena while ensuring that the BJP’s growth in the state doesn’t suffer,” said a third BJP leader who didn’t wish to be named.

Over five years, the BJP and Fadnavis’s team steadily built up his image as a CM who is capable of delivering development to Maharashtra, with shiny ad campaigns projecting big-ticket figures of investment that has gone into sectors such as infrastructure, agriculture, irrigation and so on.

Fadnavis has also created a personal record of being only the second CM to complete a full term in the state — the first was Congress’s Vasantrao Naik. Like Naik, Fadnavis is also set to be only the second CM to come back for a consecutive term.

How political situations catalysed Fadnavis’ growth

From being the youngest Nagpur councillor, then the municipal corporation’s second-youngest mayor and now to the most powerful leader of one India’s largest and richest states, Devendra Fadnavis has seen a phenomenal political growth. But certain political situations played the catalyst.

The biggest of them was the well-known rivalry between two Maharashtra BJP factions — one led by the late Gopinath Munde and the other by Union Minister Nitin Gadkari.

Fadnavis’s elevation as state BJP president in 2013 was mainly because he visibly didn’t belong to either camp. Back then, the Gadkari faction worked hard to ensure that Munde — a powerful leader during whose heydays the BJP gathered strength in Maharashtra — does not become the state unit president. It backed Sudhir Mungantiwar for a second term.

On his part, Munde backed Fadnavis and the central BJP leadership eventually picked him as a consensus candidate who was known to be polite and accommodating.

Munde’s death in 2014 and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rise also hastened Fadnavis’s surge in the party, as he won the trust of the Modi-Amit Shah regime during his term as the BJP state president.

Modi’s favourite

Political analyst Hemant Desai said, “Post the 2014 state legislative assembly election, Modi preferred a new face in Maharashtra and Fadnavis was the right candidate as he was from Vidarbha and in favour of statehood for the region, as well as a Brahmin face, two things that only the BJP could give in Maharashtra.”

Over his term as CM, Fadnavis steadily developed an image of being an administrator cut in the mould of PM Modi.

“The CM has the prime minister’s ear. This has helped the state government get several projects and proposals fast-tracked at the Centre, whether it is aid for drought relief or major infrastructure works,” a senior Maharashtra government official who did not wish to be named said.