Opinion Express View on Tejashwi Yadav as RJD’s CM face: A new calibration

In November 2005, in the election that the NDA won in Bihar, unseating Lalu Prasad’s party from its long years in power and ushering in Nitish raj, RJD rule was often described by its opponents as “jungle raj”. Twenty years later, much water has passed under the bridge, but the epithet hasn’t faded, or lost its power to taint the legacy of a leader who succeeded in giving the politics of “social justice” a powerful new currency in the state. On January 18, therefore, when the national executive of the RJD formally declared Tejashwi Yadav the party’s chief ministerial candidate for the upcoming Bihar polls, and gave him the power to change the party’s symbol and name — a prerogative exclusive to his father Lalu Prasad so far — it seemed to be signaling a new calibration, and change of course. It appeared to be acknowledging that Lalu’s political legacy must be more visibly leavened with a future-facing vision.

There is, of course, nothing new in Tejashwi being projected as his party’s CM face. Since 2015, when he fought his first assembly election — the RJD became the single largest party both in 2015 and 2020 — he has played a pivotal role. In 2020, in a campaign from which Lalu Prasad was absent because of his incarceration, Tejashwi’s slogan of “10 lakh jobs” seemed to resonate with the youth, eager to hear fresh promises and narratives. Tejashwi claims credit for the five lakh jobs that the Bihar government distributed during his brief, 17-month tenure as deputy CM. However, Tejashwi’s political arc also shows that he continues to struggle with the burden of expectations and ghosts of the past. Given the family he belongs to, his is the challenge to establish himself as an independent leader who is not dominated by his father’s shadow. He also needs to nudge the RJD to cast a wider social net. Before last year’s Lok Sabha election, he took a step in that direction, expanding the party’s appeal from its traditional M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) to MY-BAAP (including Bahujan, Agda, Aadhi Aabadi and poor). The RJD gave tickets to candidates from castes that were under-represented earlier on its list.

Advertisement

These are times when the “social justice” politics of the 1990s, or a version of it, has got a fresh impetus because of the demands for a caste census, raised ahead of the Lok Sabha elections — the Nitish government conducted a caste survey in the state. In this climate, ahead of the assembly elections scheduled towards the end of the year, Tejashwi confronts the formidable challenge of leading a party that is called upon to re-imagine and reinvent itself to stay in the game.