MUMBAI: Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, 55, has led the Bharatiya Janata Party to electoral victories before, including, most famously, in the 2024 assembly election, but all of those elections have been fought in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with a huge supporting cast of party leaders from the Centre and other states.
The 2026 local elections were almost singularly, his.
The BJP contested 15 of the 29 municipal corporations that went to polls, alone or with partners other than the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party, its partners in the Mahayuti government that rules the state.
It fought two in partnership with the NCP, and eight, with the Shiv Sena.
And the Mahayuti was in play in just four.
Indeed, as of 11.15 pm, the party had won or was leading in 1,422 of the total 2,869 seats across 29 corporations
And it wrested the Mumbai corporation, BMC, from the Shiv Sena after a quarter of a century.
Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said during the victory celebrations after the results, that it was the grand victory for the party. “It is the success of the development agenda our government at state and the national level. The people have responded to our development call and trusted on our vision of upgrading the cities. The BJP believes in inclusive Hindutva and it is accepted by the electorate,” he said.
It hasn’t always been easy for Fadnavis, a man whose critics have never stopped reminding him that he is a Brahmin, a community that accounts for just around 2% of the state’s population. He was also criticised for allowing the then united Shiv Sena to break its alliance with the BJP after the 2019 assembly elections and form a government with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party — although analysts say this was largely a function of the Shiv Sena’s ambition to have one of its own as CM.
To be sure, Fadnavis succeeded in splitting both the Shiv Sena and the NCP, and became deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-led government in June 2022, but the Mahayuti suffered significant reverses in the 2024 assembly election, winning only 17 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
Fadnavis’ detractors within the party were becoming louder, but he managed to convince the party leadership that the defeat was mainly because of poor candidate selection. He presented a plan to the leadership, chalked out a 29-point programme for the Assemly elections and won the polls . And how.!
The BJP won 132 of the 145 seats it contested for a strike rate of 89%. And the magnitude of the victory meant that there was really only one serious contender for the chief minister’s post — Fadnavis.
“The party was expecting to win seats around 105 in the Assembly polls, as per our internal assessment,” said a state BJP minister who asked not to be named.
Expectedly, the state’s developmental journey, welfare , and Mumbai’s $-billion makeover were central to the BJP’s pitch. In the local elections, the Mahayuti functioned more like a loose federation than a tight alliance. To be sure, the opposition Maharashtra Vikas Agadhi was all but absent.
And Fadnavis, the chief minister, became the face of the campaign.
He held 77 events including rallies, road shows and gave several public interviews. And that was just in the second phase of the local election. He did almost as many in the first too. “No other leader either from the ruling or the opposition alliance did as much,” said the BJP minister cited above. And unlike 2017-BMC elections, when PM Narendra Modi and BJP chief ministers such as UP’s Yogi Adityanath participated in rallies, it was Fadnavis all the way this time.
His detractors criticise him for inducting “too many outsiders”, with one of them saying that while this may be the party’s “national strategy”, but especially with this victory, such criticism is likely to become muted.
Mumbai based political analyst Hemant Desai said that the corporation results have reinforced Fadnavis’s leadership. “The outstanding victory for the party will help him in projecting himself as a serious contender at the national level.”