From corporator to CM, Fadnavis tames the tiger
MUMBAI: A day before results to Maharashtra’s civic and rural body polls were announced, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis completed 25 years in electoral politics.
Fadnavis was first elected as a corporator in the Nagpur Municipal Corporation as a 21-year-old, went on to complete two terms, then one term as the city’s youngest mayor and subsequently three terms as legislator. Thursday’s poll results – billed as a referendum on his government’s two-and-half years in Maharashtra — came as a big win for Fadnavis, though the verdict for Mumbai’s civic body was split.
The elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), civic bodies of nine other cities and 25 district councils governing rural areas were dubbed as Maharashtra’s mini assembly polls, a high-stakes battle for the ruling BJP and the Shiv Sena.
It is anybody’s guess who’s the winner. In the last three decades of Mumbai politics, ever since the Shiv Sena grabbed power in the BMC as the self-proclaimed messiah of the Marathi manoos, no chief minister directly took on Bal Thackeray’s tigers and won in the bargain.
But Fadnavis, 46, did just that, something even political veterans including former Congress chief ministers Vilasrao Deshmukh and more recently Prithviraj Chavan had failed to do.
From a relative lightweight who had never worked in the government before his promotion as the chief minister after the 2014 polls, Fadnavis will now be seen as the BJP leader who managed to sideline the Congress in the city of its origin and the state which it had ruled since Independence.