Maharashtra governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari, who will call the shots in the state after the imposition of President’s rule, has like Prime Minister Narendra Modi risen up the ranks after starting off as an RSS pracharak in the hilly terrains of what is now the state of Uttarakhand.

Koshyari still wears the RSS’s trademark black inverted boat cap. The low-profile and grounded leader was among a bunch of senior BJP politicians led by L.K. Advani who were quietly edged out and denied party tickets to contest the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year because of advanced age.

Koshyari, 87, was asked by the current leadership of the BJP to retire from active politics and he abided by the diktat without even a semblance of a protest. In 2014, he had won a Lok Sabha berth from Uttarakhand.

“He is an old-school leader committed to the organisation. He will accept whatever the leadership decides even if he has been wronged,” a BJP leader from Uttarakhand said.

This leader claimed that in 2007, Koshyari had virtually been the overwhelming choice of the newly elected MLAs of Uttarakhand for the chief minister’s post.

“The central leadership, however, decided to make his rival B.C. Khanduri the chief minister and he was denied (the post),” the leader said. “Koshyari accepted it quietly and accompanied Khanduri to Raj Bhavan to stake claim to form the government,” the leader added.

Koshyari’s dedication and commitment to the organisation was in a way rewarded when he was appointed governor of the country’s second-largest state, Maharashtra, in September this year. “He will now rule a big state like Maharashtra as governor,” another BJP leader said.

Not that Koshyari has always been deprived of the opportunity to rule a state in his long political career. He was chief minister, albeit for a few months, when Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000. In the next election in 2002, the Congress under then stalwart N.D. Tiwari won. After that whenever the BJP came to power in the state, Koshyari topped the race for the chief minister’s chair but lost out at the last moment.

Most of the current top BJP leaders in Uttarakhand, including chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, are said to have been groomed by him. Working quietly as an RSS pracharak in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, Koshyari got his first break in the mid-nineties when he was elected to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council.

After the creation of a separate Uttarakhand state in 2000, he remained active in the state and was even made BJP state unit president. Koshiyari was sent to the Rajya Sabha in 2008 and then the Lok Sabha in 2014. “He failed in the small state but now fate has made him the ruler of the country’s second-largest state,” a BJP leader said.