Bhajan Lal Sharma’s elevation from the Bharatiya Janata Party’s lowest ranks to the Chief Minister’s post is seen as a morale booster for the low-key and faceless workers of the organisation who silently toil on the sidelines for the party.

Party workers point to an incident when they talk about Mr. Sharma’s low-key activism. There was a transformer next to his house in Bharatpur. He made several rounds to the electricity department requesting it to be moved, but nothing happened for years. But within hours of the announcement that he would be the new Chief Minister of Rajasthan, the transformer was removed.

A first-time MLA from Sanganer constituency in Jaipur, Mr. Sharma, 56, is the second Brahmin Chief Minister of the State in the past three decades. He will have two deputies, Diya Kumari, a Rajput, and Prem Chand Bairwa, who hails from a Dalit community.

Mr. Sharma is the son of a farmer, Kishan Swaroop Sharma, at Atari village in Bharatpur. He was an average student in school, and chose to study arts for graduation and did his Bachelors of Education (B.Ed.) as his father wanted him to become a teacher. But destiny had some other plans for Mr. Sharma who could not clear the interview for a teacher’s job. When the father’s dream was shattered, he decided to follow his own, which was politics.

Mr. Sharma, who was associated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the students’ wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), is known to be a dedicated volunteer of the ‘Sangh’. After completing college in late 1980’s, Mr Sharma decided to help family in farming and milk business.

In his ‘Jeevan Parichay’ (Life Introduction), Mr. Sharma writes how in 1990, when the ABVP organised ‘Kashmir Bachao Andolan’, he as a student leader participated in the same and courted arrest in Udhampur. He went to jail again in 1992, during the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation during which Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished. An FIR was filed against him in 2011 for Gopalgarh riots in which 10 Meo Muslims were killed during a dispute between Gujjar and Meos over a piece of land. The case is being investigated by the CBI.

This story was originally published in thehindu.com. Read the full story here .