Thursday, 05 December 2024
Thursday, 05 December 2024
BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday said the post of Maharashtra chief minister is a "technical arrangement" and he would run the new Mahayuti coalition government in the state by taking allies Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar along.
Fadnavis, 54, was speaking to reporters after meeting governor C.P. Radhakrishnan who invited the BJP leader from Nagpur to form the next government.
Fadnavis was accompanied by Shinde and Pawar.
"Chief minister's post is a technical arrangement. All three of us will work together unitedly," Fadnavis said, per a PTI report.
"I and two deputy chief ministers will take oath [during the swearing-in ceremony on Thursday evening]. It is yet to be decided how many ministers will take oath," he said.
The swearing-in will take place at the Azad Maidan ground in south Mumbai at 5.30pm on Thursday. In attendance will be Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several Union ministers besides chief ministers of NDA-ruled states.
The Mahayuti coalition won last month's Assembly elections by a landslide, bagging 230 of 288 seats.
As Fadnavis readies for his second stint as chief minister of Maharashtra, The Telegraph online looks at five controversies he has been involved in earlier.
The ‘vote jihad’ declaration
During this Maharashtra Assembly election campaign, Devendra Fadnavis had blamed “vote jihad” as the reason behind the BJP and its allies’ poor showing in the Lok Sabha elections in the state held earlier this year.
Return of the gangsters
While Fadnavis held the home portfolio as one of the two deputy chief ministers, gang activities shot up in Mumbai. The most prominent examples were the firing outside Bollywood star Salman Khan’s house in Mumbai’s Bandra and the murder of NCP leader Baba Siddiqui barely a month before the polls.
The jailed Punjab gangster Lawrence Bishnoi’s gang has claimed responsibility for both the incidents.
Fadnavis also drew flak for delay in the arrest of those involved in the Badlapur sexual assault.
A WhatsApp chat between Fadnavis’s wife and bookie
In March 2023, chargesheet filed by the Mumbai Police crime branch against an alleged cricket bookie and former NCP leader Anil Jaisinghani and his daughter had revealed the duo had offered to bribe Fadnavis’s wife, Amruta, to squash the charges against the bookie.
The chargesheet had a WhatsApp chat between the bookie and Fadnavis’s wife allegedly discussing how to bring down the MVA government which was in power from 2019 to 2022.
The miracle that wasn’t
In February 2016, during Fadnavis’s first stint as Maharashtra chief minister, it was reported that his wife had accepted a chain produced by a religious leader during an award ceremony in Pune and accepted it as a “miracle”.
Amruta Fadnavis had to issue a statement denying the incident.
The accounts controversy
Fadnavis was accused of misusing his position as the chief minister and ordering police personnel to transfer their account to a private bank where his wife was working in a senior position.
Amruta denied the charges and said the accounts were held by the bank much before she married the Nagpur-based politician.
