(Saurabh Gupta is Correspondent with NDTV 24X7)Devendra Fadnavis is a politician known for his ability to stay calm in the midst of heated debates in the Maharashtra Assembly. While he often led the BJP attack on the government, his cool nature earned him friends among other parties as well.
That trait - of equanimity and resilience through heated politics - served him well in the last one week which ended with his party making it clear that he will head the new government in Maharashtra.
Till this state election was held, Devendra Fadnavis, 44, was not a name necessarily familiar outside Maharashtra. The attention that suddenly came his way was difficult to manage, not least because it temporarily pitted him against his one-time mentor, Nitin Gadkari.
Fadnavis's father, Gangadharrao, a senior leader within the Jan Sangh, had groomed Gadkari in his youth. And when Fadnavis lost his father at the age of 17, it was Gadkari who stepped in as guide.
I have observed him over the past one week while reporting on him as he moved between Mumbai and Nagpur. When a controversy erupted over Nitin Gadkari asserting his power over BJP law-makers from Vidarbha, in a clear attempt to challenge Fadnavis in the competition for Chief Minister, the man at the centre of the controversy chose to keep quiet. We trailed Fadnavis and night, hoping he would react at some point. At every juncture he politely told us there was nothing that he had to say. Every time we went to his home, he would greet us with a smile. But never uttered a word against his one-time mentor.
But will there be a power struggle between Gadkari and Fadnavis? Given that both are from the same region and also belong to the same caste, Fadnavis's rise may result in the diminishment of Nitin Gadkari's stature as the sole face of Vidarbha. And political experts attribute Gadkari's show of strength to this. However, with Gadkari and Fadnavis exchanging pleasantries at the annual Lakshmi Puja at the Nagpur BJP office for Diwali, a truce, however fragile, seems to have been engineered- largely at the instance of the RSS, which reportedly called for an end to the public dissent by Team Gadkari.
Fadnavis's friends say his politics is not about confrontation. He is a meticulous planner and a stickler for detail. This, they say, allowed him to scour the fine print in government files where he collected much ammunition in his party's attack against the Congress-NCP government for an alleged array of scams.
Fadnavis's elevation to Chief Minister will also result in him superseding senior BJP leader Eknath Khadse who served as Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly. And this is again something Fadnavis will have to handle carefully. But sources say he is carefully reaching out to all leaders to reassure them of their importance, partly by stressing that he will need their guidance as he takes over as the second-youngest chief minister to serve Maharashtra.
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