How a bal swayamsevak from Nagpur won, lost, and then reclaimed his state

Devendra Fadnavis burst onto Maharashtra's political stage between 2012 and 2014 with his regular "exposes" of alleged corruption in irrigation projects, targeting Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal and Sunil Tatkare of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which was then in power in partnership with the Congress.

- Surendra P Gangan and Pradip Kumar Maitra

Fadnavis's hammering of corruption allegations, including over Mumbai's Adarsh apartments, was so effective that it became a national talking point, and emerged as one of the factors in the eventual ouster of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2014.

On Thursday, Fadnavis, 54, will take oath as Maharashtra's chief minister for the third time-and by his side, taking oath as his deputies will be former CM Eknath Shinde, and the leader Fadnavis once relentlessly targeted, Ajit Pawar.

Nagpur man Fadnavis's rise as one of the most powerful leaders in the state, and consequently in the country, has been both meteoric and fraught. His father Gangadhar Fadnavis, an old Jan Sangh loyalist, was a legislative council member who was arrested during Emergency. The young Fadnavis, then just eight years old, was so riled by the arrest that he opted out of his convent school because it was named after then prime minister Indira Gandhi, and took admission in Saraswati Vidyalaya in Nagpur's Shankar Nagar instead.

Besides his late father, his aunt Shobhatai, a lawmaker from Chandrapur, was the other seminal influence on him.

"Devendra was from the Dharam peth shakha of the RSS. He and his brother Ashish joined when they were young boys and they would attend the RSS's winter camp at Khapri religiously," says senior Sangh activist Avinash Sangwai. He recalls that while older activists like him had to supervise the bal swayamsevkas, "Devendra, even though young himself, would do our job; his leadership qualities were manifest even then." The precocity became further evident when Fadnavis became a corporator of the Nagpur municipal corporation at age 22, and the city's mayor at 27.