Why RJD chose an EBC as state president

As Bihar prepares for its most decisive political carnival, democracy asserts itself as part pageant, part arithmetic. Pitted against a formidable five-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has deployed a stratagem as old as power: if you cannot disarm your adversaries, win over their followers. Thus, sending ripples through Bihar's mud-brick constituencies and bamboo-scaffolded villages, the RJD has anointed veteran socialist leader and former MP Mangani Lal Mandal—a scion of the Dhanuk caste, listed among the Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs)—as its new state president.At 76, Mandal brings not only a lifetime of political odyssey but, crucially, fresh momentum to RJD plans to penetrate the votes of the EBCs, a sprawling coalition of 112 castes accounting for some 36.01 per cent of Bihar's electorate.advertisementInto this calculus steps Mandal with his Dhanuk cohort—2.21 per cent of the state's population, yet among the top five EBC groups in density, concentrated in districts such as Madhubani, Supaul, Patna and Nalanda, and holding significant numbers in over a dozen others. Since CM Nitish Kumar introduced 20 per cent reservation for EBCs in Panchayat bodies in January 2006, these communities have formed the chief prop beneath the Janata Dal (United) canopy. But politics is mutable, and Tejashwi's gamble is to wrest that foundation from beneath Kumar's feet, repurposing it for the INDIA alliance's prospects in the assembly polls slated for October and November.To this end, the RJD's organisational elections—a meticulous choreography conducted from the block to district levels over the past four months—have been as much about ritual representation as realpolitik. In each district, a patchwork of quotas ensured that Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the EBCs themselves saw their leaders elevated; yet for the state presidency, only one name was ever tabled.advertisement
With no one contesting his nomination, Mandal will formally step into the role vacated by Jagdanand Singh, a Thakur leader and longtime Lalu Prasad confidante who, sources say, simply 'expressed his unwillingness' to carry on. Singh's resignation, accepted with all the solemnity of a ritual libation, cleared the path for Mandal's uncontested ascendancy—an outcome that signals both the RJD's urgency in courting the EBC bloc and its confidence in the Dhanuk veteran's ability to deliver his supporters to the polling booths.To the casual observer, Mandal might seem an unlikely standard-bearer. Born and bred in the Kosi and Mithilanchal regions, his political life has been rooted in the very soil of parochial identities. He first cut his teeth under Karpoori Thakur, the inadvertently eponymous architect of Bihar's own affirmative politics, earning a seat in the Legislative Council in 1986 as a Lok Dal nominee. For 18 years, until 2004, Mandal represented his caste's interests from the council benches, even securing a ministerial portfolio in the RJD government of the 1990s. Yet, while contemporaries Lalu and Nitish ascended to the national stage, Mandal's orbit remained confined—respected but regional, influential yet never indispensable.In 2004, a new chapter began when he crossed the floor to join Nitish's JD(U), which promptly dispatched him to the Rajya Sabha. Five years later, he contested—and won—the Jhanjharpur Lok Sabha seat for the JD(U), only to surrender it in a series of capricious realignments: a return to the RJD, another defection to JD(U) just before the 2019 polls, and a vice-presidency in the latter's national hierarchy. Each switch, while sharpening whispered accusations of opportunism, underscored one immutable truth: Mandal, for all his electoral vicissitudes, remains one of the most relevant EBC faces.advertisementThat relevance is now the RJD's greatest currency. Aware that Muslims (17.7 per cent of voters) and Yadavs (14.26 per cent) alone cannot clinch victory in Bihar's bipolar contest, the party's leadership has crafted a strategy to cobble together enough disparate blocs to forestall a straight fight between the INDIA alliance and the BJP-JD(U) NDA.Should Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj succeed in siphoning votes from both alliances, Bihar could be plunged into a three-cornered contest—leaving the two major coalitions, the NDA and INDIA, scrambling to secure an outright majority—precisely the sort of impasse in which the RJD might finally flourish beyond the confines of a straight bipolar fight with the NDA. Jan Suraaj, though, remains a mercurial entity—its tactics unpredictable, its grassroots machinery still in its infancy—so the RJD must hedge its bets by fortifying its own strongholds.advertisementBy placing Mandal at the helm in Patna, the RJD signals not only a gesture of inclusion but a declaration of intent: to traverse caste hierarchies from the Yadav pulpit down to the most marginalised outcrops.Asked to reflect on his unopposed elevation, Mandal adopted the deferential tone of a seasoned cadre. 'It is a matter of great honour,' he told reporters, 'and a challenge and responsibility in this election year. I am deeply thankful to national president Lalu Prasad and Leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav for this trust.' His words, though circumspect, belie the knowing confidence of one who has navigated power's labyrinth for decades. For beneath the courteous veneer lies a lifetime of electoral tunnel vision—an acute understanding of micro-majorities, vote swings and the art of coalition-building at the booth level.One senior RJD insider put it bluntly: 'Mangani Lal Mandal is our most credible EBC face. His election sends a strong message that RJD practises A-to-Z politics.' It is a nod to inclusivity without excluding any particular caste or community, but the shorthand here is unmistakable: weaponise representation to deter defection. In Bihar, where every leader's loyalty is measured in inches of margin and percentages of turnout, such signalling can prove decisive.advertisementCome October, when the polls open and placards flutter above the looming speaker-nests in village squares, it will be the ground game that delivers or defeats the INDIA alliance. Will Mandal's presence—zinc-grey hair gleaming beneath a folded cap—animate the EBCs to rally behind the RJD? Can he, with his measured gait and supple courtroom rhetoric, translate personal gravitas into collective mobilisation? Only then will one know whether Tejashwi's gambit has shifted Bihar's electoral geometry or merely reshuffled its entrenched fault lines.For now, the appointment stands as one of Tejashwi's boldest moves since assuming the RJD's de facto leadership. It marries the iconography of socialist stalwarts to the impulse of youthful ambition—and positions the party to lay claim to the very constituency that once seemed secured by its chief rival. In the end, Mandal's mantle is more than ceremonial: it is the newest weapon in an unfolding contest where every caste, every community and every vote warrant strategic consideration. And in Bihar, strategy is not an abstraction but a daily, door-to-door endeavour, measured in the hum of two-strokes, the sway of cadences and the muster of hands at the EVM.advertisementSubscribe to India Today Magazine

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