Yashwant to Jayant, why Hazaribagh’s Sinha family haunts BJP despite absence from fray

Sources say that in his reply to the show-cause, Jayant is likely to refute the charges made against him.

A two-term MP from Hazaribagh, who won from the seat in the 2019 polls by over 4.79 lakh votes, he was replaced with local MLA Manish Jaiswal this time. Just before the BJP’s announcement of Jaiswal’s candidature, Jayant said he did not wish to contest as he would like to devote his time to addressing the global climate change issue.

The refusal of ticket to him was a second snub after the denial of a ministerial portfolio to Jayant in the Narendra Modi government 2.0, despite his earlier ministerial stints.

The current polls mark the first time since 1998 that there is no one from the Sinha family in the Hazaribagh fray. Yashwant, a former Union minister from the Vajpayee era-led BJP governments, who some time back crossed over to the Opposition side, announced his support for Congress candidate Jai Prakash Bhai Patel against Jaiswal.

However, Yashwant had denied reports that Aashir, 22, had joined the Congress, noting that he was not even of the age where he could contest elections.

With the BJP now turning the heat on Jayant, asking why he is not doing organisational work and “not even voting”, which the party said was “tarnishing” its image, he might be headed on his father’s course.

From former IAS officer Yashwant Sinha, who quit the coveted service in the 1980s to join politics, to his son Jayant, an IIT Delhi and Harvard Business School alumnus who was in the corporate world before joining politics in 2014, the family has had multiple professional and political accomplishments. It is also no stranger to controversy.

A 1960-batch IAS officer, Yashwant remained in government service for 24 years, getting postings in Bihar, Delhi and even abroad. After obtaining a masters’ degree in political science that saw him begin his career as a lecturer in Patna University before joining the IAS, he gradually made finance his forte.

Following a stint in the Janata Party, Yashwant went on to join the Janata Dal. When Chandra Shekhar split the Janata Dal to form a breakaway outfit Janata Dal (Socialist), Sinha went with him and became Union finance minister in 1990-91 when Chandra Shekhar became the Prime Minister with the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress’s support.

Later, Yashwant shifted to the BJP which had started to rise. He began to contest from Hazaribagh as the BJP candidate from 1998 onwards. Winning the seat in 1998 and 1999, Sinha went on to become the finance minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government for a few years, following which he did a stint as the external affairs minister from 2002 to 2004. As the finance minister, Sinha changed the colonial tradition of presenting the budget in Parliament at 5 pm to 11 am.

In 2004, Sinha lost the Hazaribagh seat but soon returned to Parliament through the Rajya Sabha. However, in the post-Vajpayee era, his clout in the BJP began to wane — like that of other senior leaders like Murli Manohar Joshi and Jaswant Singh — with Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Venkaiah Naidu and Ananth Kumar emerging as the party’s key leaders in Delhi. In the states, it was Narendra Modi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh, who had become the faces of the party.

Yashwant would still hold the occasional press conferences on economic issues at the BJP headquarters or the Parliament complex. He also bounced back in the 2009 polls to win back the Hazaribagh seat.

During the period when Nitin Gadkari was the BJP president, Yashwant remained on the sidelines, and even created a slight scare for him in 2013 by procuring the nomination papers in the election for the BJP president’s post. This was when Gadkari was trying to get a second term as the party president. The BJP had never seen a contest for the party president’s post since its inception in 1980. It was widely believed that Sinha, along with L K Advani, did not want Gadkari to be repeated as the party chief. At the last moment, the party decided to replace Gadkari with Rajnath Singh in the wake of the former’s Purti group of companies having come under a cloud over alleged irregularities at a time when the BJP was gunning for the Congress over corruption.

In the 2014 polls, Yashwant passed the baton to son Jayant, who was fielded by the BJP from Hazaribagh. Jayant had been informally helping his father and the BJP for a long time, even as he had been in the field of venture capital.

Jayant romped home in Hazaribagh, thus keeping the family seat secure. In the Modi government’s first term then, he was appointed as the minister of state for finance – under the then FM Arun Jaitley – from 2014 to 2016, and as the MoS for civil aviation from 2016 to 2019.

However, by this time, Yashwant had become a strident critic of the Modi regime. In 2017, he stated that demonetisation and GST was a “cruel joke” that piled misery on the poor and pushed those on the edge of poverty below the poverty line. This drew a rejoinder from Jayant, who hailed the “new economy” in the making and said that “recent criticisms” were based on a narrow set of facts and missed that reforms were paving the way for an economic transformation. Yashwant shot back, saying that if Jayant was made to write a rejoinder to his piece, pitting the son against the father was a “cheap trick”. He also wondered that if Jayant was competent enough to answer the points made by him, why was he removed from the finance ministry a year ago.

In July 2018, Jayant landed in a controversy when he garlanded several men convicted of lynching a Jharkhand meat trader Alimuddin Ansari after they walked out of jail on bail. “I do not approve of my son’s action,” Yashwant then said.

It is widely believed in political circles that Yashwant’s targeting of the Modi government was one of the main reasons for Jayant losing out on becoming a minister in 2019 despite his big win from Hazaribagh.

Yashwant has however only doubled down on his scathing attacks on the Modi dispensation. He joined the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) and went on to become the Opposition parties’ joint candidate in the 2022 Presidential election against the BJP-led NDA’s nominee Droupadi Murmu.

Describing the Presidential poll as a contest of ideologies rather than individuals, Yashwant said, “My son is doing his Raj Dharma and I am following my Rashtriya Dharma.”