Chandrashekhar Bawankule

Chandrashekhar Krishnarao Bawankule was the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Maharashtra^[1] and a Member of 15th Maharashtra Legislative Assembly representing Kamptee Vidhan Sabha. He was a member of the 13th Maharashtra Legislative Assembly^[2] and Minister for Energy, New and Renewable Energy Maharashtra,^[3][4] Ministry of State Excise (Maharashtra),^[5] and also appointed the Guardian Minister of Nagpur on 26 December 2014.^[6]

As a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he represented the Kamptee Assembly Constituency, being elected from there in 2004, 2009 & 2014.^[7] In 2012, he was made Secretary of the Bhartiya Janata Party, Maharashtra State Unit in Devendra Fadnavis' team. In a cabinet expansion, he was given charge of the state excise department on 10 July 2016.

Chandrashekhar Bawankule was born in Kamptee into a Marathi Teli family. He is married to Jyoti Bawankule and has two children.

Bawankule was born and raised in a farming family with no political background. Koradi, located near Nagpur, is the place where he pursued his higher education in the stream of Science & completed first year.

Bawankule's career commenced in earnest in the early nineties, he started "Chhatrapati Sena" and continued its social work till 1994. In 1995, he joined the Bhartiya Janata Party under the leadership of Gopinath Munde and Nitin Gadkari. In the same year, he became the Vice President of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, a youth wing of the BJP in Maharashtra.

In 1997 & 2002, Bawankule was elected as a District Council Member. In 2004, he was elected to the Maharashtra state assembly for the first time, from Kamptee constituency. He was reelected twice, in 2009 and 2014. Due to allegations of corruption, the BJP did not give Bawankule the ticket to contest Assembly elections in 2019. It was given to his wife Jyoti instead, but later rescinded from her as well.