Tejashwi Yadav: From dream electoral debut to fall from grace

Patna, Nov 14 (PTI) When he was declared as the INDIA bloc’s chief ministerial candidate for the Bihar assembly polls, reportedly despite the reluctance of alliance partners, few would have imagined that RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav was courting disgrace instead of glory.

Ten years after a dream electoral debut, which saw him become the Deputy Chief Minister at a young age of 25, the heir apparent of party supremo Lalu Prasad finally won, after trailing for several rounds, from Raghopur, a RJD stronghold. He defeated BJP's Satish Kumar.

An avid cricketer whose career in the sport never really took off, a political greenhorn who got power on a silver platter but failed to keep it, a scion of Bihar's most powerful family who could not get past the 9th grade -that was Tejashwi Yadav until 2020. However, the 2020 Bihar assembly elections marked the coming of age of a politician who valiantly went down fighting an army of battle-hardened veterans.

He announced his "retirement" from cricket just a couple of years before entering politics in 2015. Soon, Lalu made it clear that Tejashwi was his chosen successor, and he was appointed the Deputy Chief Minister in the Nitish Kumar government.

As fate would have it, Tejashwi's name cropped up in a money laundering case related to alleged illegal land transactions when his father was the railway minister in the UPA-1 government. Tejashwi was in his teens when the alleged scam happened.

The development drew heavy opposition, and Nitish Kumar snapped his ties with the RJD before returning to the NDA.

In the latest elections, the tally of the RJD, which was the single largest party in the 2020 Bihar polls with 75 seats, drastically reduced to less than half.

It appeared that he second-youngest of nine siblings, Tejashwi, completely failed to counter the ruling alliance's narrative that a victory for the RJD-led coalition would mean a "return of jungle raj".

Lewd canvassing by RJD candidates, involving minor boys who spoke, on stage, of their ambitions to become "rangdaar" (bullies) and carry "katta" (country-made unlicensed pistols), was not taken exception to by the party leadership, lending further credence to the "jungle raj" narrative.

Yadav also seemed to have erred in assessing the goodwill that Nitish Kumar, his former boss and an arch-rival of his father, enjoyed despite having been in power for 20 years.

Near absence of females at his rallies, highlighted by many ground reports, pointed in the direction of a trust deficit on the part of women of the state, for whom Kumar’s rule embodied empowerment and security, a fact the RJD leader may have ignored at his own peril.

In hindsight, it also appears that promises like "a law to ensure at least one member of every family had a government job" may have lent a frivolity to the campaign of Yadav, whom even non-NDA critics like Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor have dismissed as "Lalu ji’s son, far from making his own mark". PTI NAC PYK PYK