Sharad Yadav joining hands with Lalu Prasad is good optics — nothing more

JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav (PTI File Photo) (PTI11_12_2018_000055B)

Nearly 25 years after they parted ways, two veteran socialist leaders have come together to revive the erstwhile Janata Dal.

On March 20, former Union minister Sharad Yadav merged his Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad.

The friends-turned-foes-turned-friends are now at the fag end of their political career, and have lost the political charisma they once had over the electorate in the Hindi heartland.

The Janata Dal Days

While 74-year-old Sharad Yadav is more interested in retaining his official house in Delhi and has already been asked by the Delhi High Court on March 15 to vacate the government bungalow within 15 days, ailing Prasad, 73, is currently in jail over the fodder scam.

Both were members of the erstwhile Janata Dal till 1997, when Prasad broke ranks to form the RJD.

Yadav's faction along with the Samata Party of George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar came together in 1998 to form the Janata Dal (United) that eventually ousted the RJD from power in Bihar in 2005.

Before turning foes, Yadav had played a major role in the appointment of Prasad as Bihar Chief Minister after the 1990 elections. While then Prime Minister VP Singh was keen on Ram Sundar Das, Yadav with the help of Devi Lal upstaged Singh and Prasad went on to win the contest by three votes.

String Of Defeats

The LJD's merger is purely symbolic in nature, and hardly has any significance in today’s Bihar politics.

Unlike Prasad, Yadav has no mass base in Bihar. His home state is Madhya Pradesh, and had won the first Lok Sabha election from Jabalpur in 1974. He even contested the polls from Uttar Pradesh before shifting to Bihar's Madhepura, a Lok Sabha seat he won four times, only with the support of either Prasad or Kumar, and even the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Yadav had even unsuccessfully contested against former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi from Amethi in 1981.

He formed the LJD in 2018 after parting ways with the JD(U). Yadav had opposed Kumar's move to realign with the BJP after winning the 2015 Bihar elections in alliance with the RJD and the Congress.

Kumar snapped ties with the BJP after 17 years in 2013 following the announcement of Narendra Modi's name as the BJP's prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

But Kumar went back to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) fold in 2017 following differences with Prasad, and is leading a coalition government in Bihar despite his party having won far fewer seats than the BJP. Of late, there have again been some tension in their ties. A viral video of Nitish Kumar's tiff with Bihar assembly speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha of the BJP over the transfer of a cop exposed the fault-lines within the ruling alliance.

Rumours about LJD’s merger with the RJD started when he contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Madhepura as an RJD candidate but lost to JD(U)’s Dinesh Yadav; this was Sharad Yadav’s  fourth defeat on the seat.

Just Optics

This merger could be more with an eye on Sharad Yadav securing a Rajya Sabha seat. There are already two vacancies, and four more will arise in the coming weeks from Bihar. Out of these, the RJD is likely to bag two seats, and Sharad Yadav is hopeful securing one nomination; this would mean that he would not have to vacate his Lutyens’ bungalow. Sharad Yadav's Rajya Sabha term ended abruptly in 2017 after the JD(U) requested his membership be cancelled after he raised a banner of revolt against Nitish Kumar.

The LJD does not have a sizeable political base for Sharad Yadav to launch and settle the political futures of his children. While his daughter Subashini Raj Rao contested and lost the 2020 Bihar elections as a Congress candidate, his son Shantanu Bundela is waiting for a launch pad.

On the other hand, Tejashwi Yadav has already established himself as an undisputed heir of Prasad's legacy, and left his siblings far behind with his sharp political acumen.

Sharad Yadav doesn’t bring much to the table for the RJD, and it is too early to predict if the coming together of the two veteran socialist leaders will make any difference in Bihar. The only takeaway as of now seems to be the optics of a section of the opposition parties joining hands against the BJP and the NDA ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Aurangzeb Naqshbandi is a senior journalist who has been covering the Congress for 15 years, and is currently associated with Pixstory.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.