This story is from October 17, 2019

Maharashtra elections: CM Devendra Fadnavis wins over Vidarbha with heavy-duty projects

During the 2014 assembly polls, when Devendra Fadnavis was state Bharatiya Janata Party chief, speculation was rife that Vidarbha’s ‘son of the soil’ might get the coveted chair of chief minister.
Maharashtra elections: CM Devendra Fadnavis wins over Vidarbha with heavy-duty projects
Devendra Fadnavis
During the 2014 assembly polls, when Devendra Fadnavis was state Bharatiya Janata Party chief, speculation was rife that Vidarbha’s ‘son of the soil’ might get the coveted chair of chief minister.
TOI published a report saying as much on October 17, 2014, based on the claims of top BJP leaders.
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At the time, there were many contenders for the post, including senior leaders like Eknath Khadse and even former deputy chief minister Gopinath Munde’s daughter Pankaja.

Five years down the line, there is little doubt that if BJP-Sena win the state polls, Fadnavis would continue to be chief minister.
Unlike other chief ministers who neglected Vidarbha, Fadnavis has strengthened his ties with the region through regular visits and a series of decisions aimed at reducing the development backlog which Vidarbha has historically suffered.
“We are not voting this time for our MLA, but for our chief minister. With the kind of development works he initiated not only in his constituency, but in the whole of
Maharashtra and Vidarbha, he’s an ideal choice for the entire state for the top post,” said Uday Dable, Fadnavis’s lawyer and a resident of the chief minister’s Nagpur South West constituency.
Along with Union minister Nitin Gadkari, a fellow Vidarbha native, Fadnavis initiated projects across a range of sectors, including Metro rail and the Nagpur-Mumbai expressway.
He has also cleared the decks for premier nationallevel institutions like AIIMS, IIM, IIIT, NLU and Symbiosis International University (SIU) to be set up in the region (see box).
In 2014, Fadnavis, a Brahmin, became the state’s second youngest chief minister after Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar.
A Brahmin chief minister is considered a politically incorrect proposition in Maharashtra, given the heavy Maratha-OBC quotient in state politics and the long-drawn Left-Socialist progressive movement in the state, say observers. But Fadnavis' caste didn’t seem to worry the state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“It's time we went beyond caste considerations,” a party leader had said at the time.
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