Maharashtra will have a new chief minister and for the first time, it will be a BJP face — 44-year-old Devendra Fadnavis was elected legislature party leader on Tuesday. For the BJP in Maharashtra, 25 years of playing second fiddle to the Shiv Sena are over. Having notched 122 seats in the assembly polls, against the Sena’s 63, and with the NCP offering outside support, it is now in a position to set the terms of any possible alliance with the Sena. The new face of the BJP in Maharashtra also signals a generation change for the party, which had looked short on leaders after the passing of Pramod Mahajan and, more recently, Gopinath Munde. Fadnavis, who cut his teeth in the municipal corporation of Nagpur and rose to become the city’s mayor, has been projected as the “young face” of the party. He is also a non-Mumbai politician who will now be expected to understand the demands of the giant, sinking metropolis that is the state capital.
But does Fadnavis also signal a new breed of BJP chief minister? In the past, the party has thrived on strong regional leaders with their own political caches. Whether it is Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan or Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh, these leaders have had a distinct political persona and imprint. They have been — and have been seen to be — the architects of the BJP’s electoral victories in their respective states. In Maharashtra in these polls, however, the BJP has won a mandate in response to a campaign that cast the spotlight firmly and solely on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With the BJP commanding a robust majority at the Centre, the equation between the party’s central and state leaderships could be changing. It needs to be seen if this means that there will be new synergies between the central and state leaders, or that BJP chief ministers will now have more limited room for manoeuvre.
