Mumbai:
When Pankaja Munde walked up to a star-studded stage for her oath today, loud applause and cheers erupted at Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium.
"Kaun Aya? Marathwada ki Sherni Aayi! (Who is it? It's the lioness of Marathwada), roared a section of the crowd that was clearly from the region in Maharashtra where she won her second term as legislator in polls earlier this month.
Pankaja, 35, is the only woman cabinet minister in new Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' team.
Many commented on social media that the young politician, dressed in a brown silk Salwar-Kameej, drew the maximum claps after Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Besides PM Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and many party chief ministers were present at the glitzy oath ceremony styled by a top Bollywood set designer; it is a historic first government in Maharashtra for the BJP.
Pankaja is the older daughter of Gopinath Munde, the union minister who was killed in an accident in June, and she is seen as the natural heir to his political legacy.
Today, she made it clear that she was her father's daughter, taking oath as "Pankaja Gopinath Munde" and dropping her married name "Palwe".
For a fleeting moment, Pankaja was talked about as a candidate for chief minister, a post that, many believe, would have been her father's without question.
"If my party asks me to be the Chief Minister, I will not say no," she had said after the BJP won the most number of seats in the Maharashtra polls earlier this month. But party leaders said while she doesn't lack the potential, she is still seen as a political novice.
Her sister, 32-year-old Dr Pritam Munde, is the new Member of Parliament from Beed, where she won by a victory margin higher than Prime Minister Narendra Modi's in Vadodara in the May national election.