Hectic political activity is set to commence in Maharashtra with the Election Commission (EC) announcing the dates for its assembly elections on Tuesday. This election will mark the first assembly-level battle between the Mahayuti alliance — comprising Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, the BJP, and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) — and the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) — which includes the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction, the Congress, and the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar).
There is never a better time than election season to delve into the lives of prominent leaders to trace their political journeys. Doing so for Deputy Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, a BJP leader who has also led the state as CM, threw up an interesting incident from his childhood days.
When Student Fadnavis Shunned ‘Indira Convent’
Devendra Fadnavis was born on July 22, 1970, in a middle-class Maharashtrian family in Nagpur, according to his website.
As the son of Gangadharrao Fadnavis, a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council affiliated with the Jana Sangh, the BJP’s precursor, Devendra Fadnavis had an early brush with politics.
His initial schooling years saw him enrolled at Indira Convent School in Nagpur, but that would change as a dark chapter of India’s history began in the mid-1970s.
During the Emergency, imposed in June 1975, and marked by mass arrests of Opposition leaders, Fadnavis’ father was arrested from a protest rally.
“This created defiance in the mind of child Devendra in a way that he refused to go to the school named after the person who was responsible for jailing his father,” his website reads. “His adamance finally saw him change to another school called Saraswati Vidyalaya (an RSS school).”
Before entering politics, Fadnavis went on to get an LLB and an MBA.
Dive Into Politics
Like many other BJP leaders, Fadnavis’ career with the party was preceded by a stint with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the RSS student wing.
At 21, he became the youngest municipal councillor of the Nagpur Municipal Corporation. In 1997, he also became the youngest mayor in Nagpur and served two consecutive terms in the post, his website notes.
In 2010, he became a BJP general secretary for Maharashtra. Three years later, he took charge of the state unit. He currently represents the South-West Nagpur constituency in the Maharashtra assembly. He first became an MLA in 1999.
In 2014, at 44, he became Maharashtra’s second-youngest CM. The first was Sharad Pawar, who became CM at 38 in 1978.