‘Thandaa denge’ vs ‘thandaa do bhai’: Tejashwi, Nityanand Rai row hots up over CBI raids, Yadav leadership

Hitting back at Tejashwi, Rai, who was then addressing a public gathering in Samastipur, took a dig at the former, saying: “Hamko thandaa do bhai (Please make me sober). Bhains ka doodh peene se log thanda ho jaate hain (buffalo milk keeps one calm).”

This was the second instance in less than two months when Tejashwi launched a sharp attack on Rai. Last month, he had charged that Rai had once approached the RJD leadership with the request of letting him join the party when he had not become a minister.

Rai had then dismissed his claim outright, saying that he had always been in a better political position in the BJP, as the state BJP president and later as the MP and Union minister, and hence Tejashwi’s claims were “all hollow”.

There could be a couple of reasons behind Tejashwi taking aim at Rai repeatedly. First, the RJD looks jittery as various central agencies like the CBI and ED have stepped up their raids at the premises of several RJD leaders in recent weeks. Tejashwi might claim in public that they are not “afraid of central agencies”, but there seem to be some signs of unease and worry at 10, Circular Road in Patna — the residence of ex-CM Rabri Devi and her husband and RJD chief Lalu Prasad.

The BJP Rajya Sabha MP, Sushil Kumar Modi, has mounted a frontal attack on Tejashwi, reminding him of his elder brother and current minister Tej Pratap Yadav naming a close Tejashwi aide as the owner of a mall not too long ago.

Tejashwi reportedly believes that Rai could be responsible for the central agencies’ move to intensify their raids on the RJD leaders in the job-for-land case. He has himself been among those chargesheeted in the 2017 IRCTC case. As the RJD accuses the BJP of “political vendetta”, the latter could be worried over the RJD’s return to power after the saffron party lost its erstwhile ally and CM Nitish Kumar to the Mahagathbandhan (the RJD-led grand alliance).

Another reason behind Tejashwi’s repeated targeting of Rai is his constant bid to emerge as the principal leader of the Yadav community in Bihar, like his father Lalu Prasad earlier. This is why whenever any Yadav leaders from the BJP try to make their presence felt, Tejashwi would go after them. He had earlier also attacked the former BJP minister and Yadav leader Ramsurat Rai.

One of the most high-profile Bihar BJP leaders and a prominent Yadav leader, Rai, who is close to Union home minister Amit Shah, has been seeking to project himself as the party’s potential CM candidate for the 2025 Assembly polls.

Rai, the two-time Ujiyarpur MP, has considerable influence in the state’s Hajipur belt. Tejashwi has already made his mark as a top state leader by spearheading the RJD’s campaign in the 2020 Assembly polls, when the party put up an impressive performance and emerged as the single largest party despite Lalu’s absence. Keen to keep the momentum going in his favour, Tejashwi always looks bent on neutralising any leadership challenge from any fellow Yadav leader.

With Rai being engaged in posturings with the chief ministerial aspiration, Tejashwi has not been missing any chance to gun for him, even if it means implicitly accepting him as a challenger for the Yadav leadership face.

Lalu also used to adopt this strategy during his heydays. First, he had nullified the influence of senior Yadav leaders like Anup Lal Mandal, Vinayak Mandal and Gajendra Himanshu to become the Leader of the Opposition following the death of former CM and socialist icon Karpoori Thakur. Later, Lalu took on Janata Dal colleague Sharad Yadav, even though the latter had little political stake in Bihar. He did not even allow the rise of the likes of former MP Rajesh Ranjan or Pappu Yadav.

While committing to ensure the formation of a rainbow social coalition beyond the RJD’s “MY (Muslim-Yadav)” support base, what he calls his “A to Z” approach, Tejashwi may however continue to focus on reinforcing his position as a principal leader of Yadavs, the largest OBC block that accounts for 14 per cent of the state’s population. He may well be taking his current stint as the DCM as an “incubation period” before he could finally take the reins as the CM. So, at this stage, he has been more concerned with keeping his core support base intact before he could mount efforts to expand it for wider acceptability.