Shinde, Fadnavis face tough balancing act in role reversal
By ensuring Fadnavis joins the government as Shinde’s deputy, there will be checks and balance for both the senior leaders
MUMBAI: Maharashtra’s newly minted chief minister has his first task cut out for him: how to be on an even keel with his once all-powerful deputy. Eknath Shinde, 58 and Devendra Fadnavis, six years his junior, were colleagues in the state cabinet for five years but this was when Fadnavis was at the helm of the state government.
While the Shinde faction owes power to the Bharatiya Janata Party, Thursday’s curious chain of events with Fadnavis, who was widely believed to be the next chief minister, first announcing that he would stay out of the Shinde-led government and then later being forced to become a part of it, leads to questions about the chain of command. By ensuring Fadnavis joins the government as Shinde’s deputy, there will be checks and balance not just for Shinde but for Fadnavis too.
In 2014, when the Shiv Sena joined the government Shinde was one of five Sena ministers in Fadnavis’s cabinet. Though Shinde was the minister for public works (public undertakings), Fadnavis was seen as the man driving that ministry. The biggest project that the Maharashtra State Roads Development Corporation Limited (MSRDC), which came under Shinde’s ambit, was executing was Fadnavis’s pet project — the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi expressway.
A senior Shiv Sena leader disclosed that, in those early days, Shinde and Fadnavis were not on the best of terms. Their political rivalry come to a head during the Kalyan Dombivali Municipal Corporation (KDMC) elections in 2015 which the Sena and the BJP contested separately. This battle was so bitter in Shinde publicly offered to resign as minister while at a campaign rally addressed by Uddhav Thackeray.
“However, they mended bridges when it came to the planning and execution of the ₹55,000 crore Samruddhi expressway project,” the Sena leader noted. The greenfield project, which includes a 701km access-controlled road that will link the state’s capital to the winter capital, was initially opposed by the Shiv Sena through a Saamna editorial in May 2017. The editorial claimed that government machinery was being misused to acquire farmland for the project. Later, Shinde claimed that the party leadership was not against the project per se but was only trying to protect the interests of the farmers. Eventually, the Shiv Sena came around and the road was renamed as the “Hinduhriday Samrat Balasaheb Thackeray Samruddhi Expressway” in memory of the late Shiv Sena supremo.
A senior bureaucrat who was in the government at the time said that when it came to MSRDC, Fadnavis and Shinde shared a good equation eventually. But, he pointed out, there was a stark contrast between the style of working of the two — Fadnavis was seen as quick and decisive, always thinking on his feet; Shinde was comparatively cautious. Sainiks often use the Marathi word “maval”, or mild, to describe Shinde’s style of operation, while Fadnavis is all fire and brimstone. When it comes to optics, too, Fadnavis is expressive and has great social skills, while Shinde is much more muted and reticent.
But over the years the two colleagues became “cautiously friendly”. In 2017, when the Shiv Sena and the BJP contested the Mumbai and Thane civic polls on their own strength, the BJP is said to have pulled its punches in Thane, which is Shinde’s pocket borough. Likewise, Fadnavis confidante and Dombivali MLA Ravindra Chavan, whose constituency is part of the Kalyan Lok Sabha seat, represented by Shinde’s son Shrikant, was among those handpicked by the BJP central leadership to arrange the logistics for the operation to topple the MVA government.
However, will the two men’s power-sharing pact play out as expected?
While there have been instances in the past in Maharashtra when chief ministers have gone on to play junior roles in subsequent governments, notably Shankarrao Chavan and Shivaji Patil Nilangekar, Fadnavis’s determined ambition is something that will bear watching out says the Sena leader who has worked with both men.
The potential flashpoint, he says, can come from the control of the state bureaucracy that Fadnavis excels at, and then over the forthcoming BMC elections.