RJD leader, Tejashwi Yadav
Tejashwi Yadav, the leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), announced a new, inclusive party slogan on Tuesday before setting out on his 10-day Jan Vishwas Yatra, which would take him through 38 districts in Bihar. While raising slogans, the Bihar leader called his RJD, ‘BAAP’ party. “Some people say RJD is MY party. RJD is not MY (Muslim-Yadav) party alone. Its base is much bigger and it belongs to people from A to Z. We have to tell them that our party RJD is not only (MY) party but also BAAP party,” he said at his first meeting in Muzaffarpur, explaining that the B stands for Bahujan in the acronym, A for agada (forward), A for aadhi abaadi (women) and P for the poor.
The Mulim-Yadav equation explained
“We are people who unite, not the one who breaks. BJP wants to divide people,” Yadav said at his rally in Muzaffarpur. In an attempt to sway a sizable portion of the electorate in his favor, Tejashwi, the younger son of RJD founder Lalu Prasad Yadav and generally regarded as his political heir, has been eager to drop the Muslim-Yadav hyphenation for his party that his father crafted in the early 1990s.
With over 13 crore people living in the state, Muslims make up about 17.7% and Yadavs 14.26% of the total population. Their backing was essential to RJD’s 15-year rule in the state until early 2005.
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Nitish switched to the other side of the court
Three weeks have passed since Yadav’s party was voted out of power on January 28 when chief minister Nitish Kumar severed ties with the RJD and teamed up with the BJP to form a new government. This is the timing of Yadav’s outreach campaign ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. From August 2022 until last month, Yadav served as the deputy chief minister in the coalition government led by Nitish Kumar.
“Nitish Kumar has no vision for the people of the state. He also had no justifiable reason for ditching us and going back to the BJP-led NDA. He thinks he can trample the people’s mandate,” he said.
“The people of Bihar have been showering their love on RJD, a reason why it has been the single largest party in the assembly for long. I am going to urge them that they support us even more strongly so that we can work for them,” Yadav said.
