It's a type of theatre that has always been done very well by the political class in Maharashtra, where ideology is a thing on one stage, and personal life is a thing on another. However, what is happening in Nagpur this month is unusual even by the managed contradiction standards of the State. Arun Lakhani, BJP's candidate to contest the Wardha-Chandrapur-Gadchiroli seat in the Maharashtra Legislative Council elections on June 18, is in the midst of an election campaign against the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi. That opposition comprises of NCP (Sharad Pawar faction) with Supriya Sule as its head in the Parliament. His son Sarang will marry Revati, Sule's daughter, on June 20, which is two days after the polling.

But Lakhani wasn't apologetic about it. On a Marathi news channel he was asked about this unusual equation and he said with utmost simplicity that the two are different Politics and family. He even accepted the good wishes of the families Sule had sent him a congratulatory message and he said that the Pawar family connection was very much in the order of things because of the stature of the family. On both sides, he added, they are adamant about their ideology.

There are two sides that are dedicated to their ideologies and “politics is separate.” The BJP man is soon to become familiar with the Pawars. There are weirder things that have happened in Maharashtra, but not quite at such a moment!

It's the optics, for Maharashtra's political calendar makes it impossible to ignore. The June 18 council elections in 16 local authorities, each having their own constituencies, are being closely watched to see if the Devendra Fadnavis-led Mahayuti alliance can translate the landslide it secured in the November 2024 assembly elections into a house of upper house majority. The ruling alliance will go into these seats with 445 votes, compared with 351 for MVA, plus 91 independent votes which could decide a marginal seat. The BJP is banking on an industrialist, rather than a career politician, to carry the ball in Wardha-Chandrapur-Gadchiroli, three very different Vidarbha districts it believes it can conquer.

Arun Lakhani is the chairman and managing director of Nagpur-based infrastructure company, Vishvaraj Group, which he bought in 1999. It started out with road and highway PPP projects and then made the switch to the water sector around the year 2007-08 when the concept of water PPP was starting to catch on in India. The big success is Nagpur 24x7 project, the first such 24x7 water supply scheme in the country, which supplies water to two and a half lakh people in Nagpur through a joint venture with French utility company Veolia Water. The project was awarded as the best practice in urban water supply at the launch of AMRUT and Smart City initiative in 2015, and has been declared as Water Deal of the Year in 2013 by Global Water Intelligence. In recent years, Vishvaraj received the Best Community Impact Project Award for the multi-village water supply project that provided access to water to more than 2.25 lakh people in 435 habitations in Karnataka at the Water Transversality Global Awards 2026.

Moreover, it's not as though this is a man with no political qualifications. Lakhani has been in the BJP Maharashtra machinery for years now and is co-treasurer of BJP Maharashtra. He has also held administrative positions with the Maharashtra Badminton Association and for the Badminton Association of India (interestingly enough not unrelated to the fact that his son Sarang's life took a specific shape.)

The groom-to-be Sarang Lakhani has completed his BCom from Nagpur University and pursued his management studies at IIM, Bangalore, and in May 2023, he finished his MBA from Columbia Business School. As a member of the Vishvaraj Group, he has more than eight years' experience as an executive director, as well as holding the position of business development consultant at Modern Hydrogen. He is as serious about badminton as his father, and has represented India at the national and international levels. That is where it is thought the families first connected socially, through sport. Photos of her husband Sadanand Sule playing with Sarang after a match of tennis were shared by Supriya Sule on Instagram, with the quiet, domestic chemistry of the two families, who were already familiar to each other, before the official announcement.

For her part, Revati Sule is one who has chosen to be unpolitical despite her lineage. She finished her schooling in Mumbai, attended St. Xavier's College and then the London School of Economics, which her mother Supriya once intellectually orbited. However, she came into the limelight briefly during the Lok Sabha campaign last year, when she campaigned with her mother in Baramati, the family bastion, against Sunetra Pawar, the wife of NCP chief Ajit Pawar, a case in point of the family's own stranger-than-fiction saga in a pre-split world. Now the outside world is coming to her door step through a very different door.

According to the reports, the match was arranged with utter silence behind the Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. This informal matchmaking by two of the most influential men in the ruling alliance is an important comment on the ways in which this state really functions.

Gadkari and Fadnavis had been involved in arranging the match, multiple outlets have said citing sources in ABP Maaza, which is arguably the most politically telling aspect of this entire story. Gadkari has always been in a strange position in Maharashtra's politics a Nagpur man with a credible national infrastructure credentials, a BJP big wale who somehow has managed to keep good personal relationship across party lines. As chief minister, Fadnavis is playing an active role in the June 18 polls with a firm agenda to move Mahayuti towards the domination of the upper house. That both were able to find time and inclination to play informal match makers in a marriage between a BJP organisational man and the Pawar political family, is no accident it is a pointer to how entrenched personal networks are in formal political conflicts in Maharashtra.

Main Milestones What has happened so far?

February 10, 2026

Daughter of the previous Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, Smriti Shinde, congratulates on Instagram, thus giving a public confirmation of the engagement.

February 11, 2026

Supriya Sule shares the news of the engagement on Instagram: "We are happy to announce that our daughter Revati Sule is engaged to be married to Sarang, son of Vandana and Arun Lakhani".

May–June 2026

Arun Lakhani announced as BJP's MLC candidate for Wardha-Chandrapur-Gadchiroli. The wedding is preceded by 2 weeks of election campaign.

June 1, 2026

Lakhani says to Marathi media "Politics and family relations are different issues. Congratulations to him, in the public message by Supriya Sule.

June 18, 2026

Elections to the Maharashtra Legislative Council in the 16 local body constituencies. Lakhani challenges BJP's claim to the seat of Wardha-Chandrapur-Gadchiroli.

June 20, 2026

Sarang Lakhani and Revati Sule will be wed two days after Lakhani senior's votes are counted.

Needless to say, the Congress hasn't remained silent. Congress Legislature Party leader Vijay Wadettiwar attacked the BJP candidate nomination on another front that the party is ignoring its grassroot workers and inducting industrialists instead. The BJP has a vast numerical advantage and his allegation on the delay in announcing candidates by the party due to concerns within the party has some teeth. With 445 to 351, a last-minute candidate announcement is no indication of confidence it is an indication of horse-trading behind the scenes. But an industrialist and party treasurer being given a nod over a career politician for the upper house race for Wardha-Chandrapur-Gadchiroli does give an impression that the BJP is conducting its upper house campaigns as much as a business affair as it is an ideological battle.

Wadettiwar also pointed out that Congress had already a person ready for Chandrapur seat whereas BJP was hesitant. MVA, in turn, fielded 17 candidates for the council seats, a move that reflects that not all 17 members of the council have thrown in the towel for the Mahayuti.

But there are more profound undercurrents to consider. The issue about the Lakhani family's ties to the RSS came up after reports of Arun Lakhani attending an event with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in 2018 reached the political discourse since the engagement news was broken in February. Last year, NCP patriarch and Revati's grandfather Sharad Pawar made headlines for putting measured praise for some aspects of the RSS but has never been in any formal political arrangement with BJP. All of this remains unchanged in the marriage. But it does mean that Sharad Pawar's granddaughter will be a part of a family that runs in very different ideological terrain either nothing in the grand scheme of things in the Indian tradition of keeping personal and political life separate, or a sign of the gradual vanishing of the ideological fences between opposing camps, depending on whom you ask.

However, purely from an economic point of view, the Lakhani-Sule marriage is also a coming together of two different models of power in Maharashtra. The Pawar family's network is based on cooperative politics on sugar cooperatives, banking institutions and the thickly woven social economy of western Maharashtra and Baramati. Vishvaraj, on the other hand, is the new-infrastructure PPP model urban water utilities, wastewater treatment, global partnerships with companies such as Veolia. It's not a world of either/or, but not a world of exactly the same either. According to most estimates, the water sector is a ₹1.5 trillion opportunity in India, underpinned by schemes such as AMRUT and Jal Jeevan Mission. Vishvaraj's successful PPP experience of implementing India's first 24x7 water scheme for an entire city and the largest PPP wastewater contract in India put the company at the sweet spot of government spending and private delivery. Maharashtra will continue to hire such works, regardless of the government in power.

Lakhani has described the constituency as huge and diverse: out of the three districts, Gadchiroli is one of the most underdeveloped and conflict-ridden in India, Wardha is the birthplace of the Gandhian movement, industrial Chandrapur is home to the Defence Ministry's 2015-16 budget. He has travelled extensively in the area through his previous experience with the Laxmanrao Mankar Trust. If that will suffice to defeat Congress's Kamble in a tight local body electorate is to be seen. However, the BJP wouldn't have put its co-treasurer in a seat it would have thought was a sucker.

The more one lurks in this story, the more it resembles a meticulous description of the workings of Maharashtra not just in terms of the ruling coalition versus the opposition, but as a complex network of family ties, business interests, regional loyalties, and personal histories, rendering every alliance provisional and every enmity negotiable. At some stage or the other, the Pawars have been on all sides of Maharashtra politics. By now the rigidity of the ideological demarcation has long been blurred at the edges as the BJP has imbibed much of the establishment of the state. The matchmaking of Nitin Gadkari and Devendra Fadnavis for a BJP-Pawar family wedding amid an election campaign is not a paradox here, it is just Tuesday in Maharashtra.

The fun will be the results of the wedding following the balloting. ## Kinship ties developed through marriage have been an effective way of long-term alignment in India's political culture, and these ties have been soft ties that take awhile to become formal. The Pawar family is too entrenched and too well-known in the opposition party to change the political map with one wedding. However, all of this adds up. Gadkari has carved out his career on this very type of patient, personal bridge building. If the Mahayuti eventually merges Maharashtra's upper house and attempts to stitch together a political deal, which brings more of the Pawar fold on-board, symbolically at least, the ground work was done on June 20 in Nagpur.

The marriage of a family arranged by a chief minister and a union minister, two days after an election in the political economy of Maharashtra is not a coincidence. It's a reflection of who really has influence.

In this sense, at least, Arun Lakhani is correct: the ballot box and the wedding mandap are indeed two distinct happenings. But in Maharashtra and most other places where politics has strong roots, there's not much that's private. The June 20 wedding will be a happy event for both families and an open question for all who watch what Maharashtra politics will look like on June 21.