Nitin Nabin's journey: From reluctant entrant to BJP working president

When Nitin Nabin was in Class 12, politics was not part of the plan.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

One of his school friends recalls that in a slam book he filled out at the time, Nabin wrote that politics was the last profession he would ever want to pursue. Nearly three decades later, the same man has been appointed Working President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the world's largest political organisation - a turn that even those closest to him say he did not see coming.

People who have known Nabin since his school and college years say politics was never an ambition he consciously nurtured. His entry into public life, they argue, was shaped more by circumstance than by design.

That circumstance arose in 2006, when his father, the then sitting BJP MLA Navin Kishor Sinha from Patna West (now Bankipore), passed away. The constituency has traditionally been a stronghold of the Jan Sangh and later the BJP, and was earlier represented by Thakur Prasad - the father of current Patna MP Ravi Shankar Prasad - and Shailendra Nath Srivastava.

According to people familiar with the developments at the time, it was late Sushil Kumar Modi who proposed Nitin Nabin's name as the party's candidate for the by-election, nudging him into active politics at a moment of personal loss.