Patna: 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 govt.
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.