MAKEOVER OF THE MANDAL CITADEL

On January 5, when Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge kickstarted the Bihar version of the Bharat Jodo Yatra in Banka, the man who arranged the logistics, and then walked beside him, was state party president Akhilesh Prasad Singh.

- Amitabh Srivastava

Just a month old in office, it's Akhilesh's brief to keep the yatra alive till it culminates next month in Bodh Gaya when Rahul Gandhi is expected to address it. He's also tasked with reviving the party in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls-an onerous job given that the Congress has been somewhat moribund in Bihar for three decades, but made partly easy by virtue of being on the right side of the ruling alliance. More to the point, Akhilesh is a Bhumihar. That the Grand Old Party has chosen a member of one of Bihar's dominant castes to lead it is not incidental-it's part of a curious cross-party trend in a state that has otherwise been a citadel of Mandal champions.

Amidst the more macro-level events that govern Indian politics, it may have escaped notice that a month ago, on December 5, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) re-elected Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh as its national president for a fresh term of three years. No one out-side Bihar may have given it a thought, but Lalan, too, is a Bhumihar. A party that thrives on caste-plus politics with a Bhumihar chief? But even that would seem a lesser event if you consider that the state unit of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the very epitome of Mandal politics, is in the hands of Jagadanand Singh-a dyed-in-the-wool socialist and an old associate of party supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, but a Rajput, no less.