After a supercharged period of electoral battles, bitter last-minute political divorces and weeks of acrimony and anxiety, the Indian state of Maharashtra is all set to enter a new political era.
Forty four-year-old Devendra Fadnavis, young and unblemished thus far, and a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that rewrote the state’s political history in this month’s assembly polls by dislodging a decades-old Congress rule, is set to take oath as the 19th chief minister of the state. This is the good news.
The not so good news: despite its strong numbers on the Assembly floor, the BJP will have to tie up with either the Shiv Sena or the Nationalist Congress Party to form the government and herein lies the rub. The run-up period to the polls starkly revealed the deep, tectonic discord between the BJP, the Sena and the NCP. So, no matter who the BJP ties up with, there is the possibility of basic incompatibilities coming up after the initial bout of reconciliation.
For Fadnavis, caught between his status as a prism to disperse Narendra Modi’s vision and a newly-minted administrator who must deal with his partners, it the start of a long tightrope walk.
