Ramcharitmanas row: A professor’s reading, and a politician’s

A professor of zoology at a private college, Chandra Shekhar first emerged as a leader of farmers in Madhepura. His 2020 poll affidavit put his assets at Rs 1.15 crore, and said he remained a professor at a Jehanabad college, on sabbatical from the job.

With Madhepura’s politics dominated by the late Sharad Yadav, Chandra Shekhar had difficulty finding his place in the region as one among many Yadav leaders there.

RJD leaders say Chandra Shekhar first attracted the attention of chief Lalu Prasad when he got an impressive number of votes contesting as an Independent in the 2005 Assembly polls from Madhepura. That was one reason the JD(U) defeated the RJD nominee from the seat.

In the 2010 Assembly polls, the RJD fielded him from the seat. Chandra Shekhar impressed the party leadership again, defeating sitting JD(U) MLA Manindra Kumar Mandal, the son of former CM and ex-Mandal Commission chairperson B P Mandal.

He retained the seat as an RJD nominee when the party fought as part of the Mahagathbandhan in the 2015 Assembly polls, and after the alliance formed the government, was made the disaster management minister.

In the 2020 polls, he defeated the JD(U)’s Nikhil Mandal, the grandson of B P Mandal, by over 16,000 votes. Since he continued to keep his place despite resistance from the Mandal family, his political stock in the RJD kept going up.

When Nitish Kumar aligned with the RJD again in August 2022, and the latter got the education portfolio as part of the arrangement, the RJD picked Chandra Shekhar for the job, for his educational qualifications as well as for being a Yadav face from the crucial Kosi belt that has a good population of the community.

In this short but impressive career, Chandra Shekhar was hardly known for his controversial remarks. So he surprised everyone when he provoked a row by calling Ramcharitmanas “a divisive text” during a convocation function at Nalanda University.

Despite the row, and the BJP wading into a controversy tailor-made for it, Chandra Shekhar has stuck to his guns, saying that he had reservations against “only some verses of Ramcharitmanas and not the entire text”. The RJD did not rush to reject Chandra Shekhar’s statements either, despite the discomfiture of ally JD(U), and despite the already existing tensions between the two. Instead, it cited Ram Manohar Lohia to say that portions of scriptures have become obsolete with time and need to be rejected.

The RJD might have moderated its stance since – with Tejashwi Yadav underlining that “the party respects all religions, no party leader should fall into the BJP’s trap”, and that the RJD holds the Constitution supreme – there has been no action such as pulling up of the minister.

This has caused many to wonder whether Chandra Shekhar has again proved the dark horse: helping the RJD, even if unwittingly, in countering the BJP’s vision of a caste-less, uniform Hindutva, while sending a message to its own backward class base.