It was in the last session of the Maharashtra Assembly, just before the State election in 2019, that Devendra Fadnavis had declared that he would be returning as Chief Minister of the State. The phrase, in Marathi, Mee Punha Yeil (I will be back), was invoked after that as a rallying cry by Mr. Fadnavis’s supporters and in mockery by his detratcors after the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance broke up and the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government was formed in 2019. On Thursday, when he prepared to anoint Eknath Shinde, the leader of the rebel Shiv Sena faction as the chief minister with the support of the BJP, a twist very few could forsee, he managed a partial payback if not a return as chief minister.
For Mr. Fadnavis, 51, the fall of the MVA government was not just a political project but more importantly a grudge match with the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Since that early morning hush-hush swearing-in on November 23, 2019, when the Shiv Sena had exited the alliance with the BJP and Mr. Fadnavis had managed to rope in a substantial chunk of NCP MLAs headed by Ajit Pawar to join a government to be headed by him, to all of it coming a cropper just 80 hours later with Mr. Pawar heading back to the parent body of the NCP, Mr. Fadnavis’s image had taken quite a knocking. The two and a half years it took for him to serve payback for that public denouement has been quite a journey.
