Friend who defeated Lalu back in RJD, with a thumbs-up for Misa: Who is Ranjan Yadav?

He was once the second-in-command of former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad. Then, having fallen out with him, joined the Janata Dal (United) and defeated him in a Lok Sabha election. Now Ranjan Prasad Yadav, 79, is back in the RJD.

Ranjan joined the Opposition party in the presence of its Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Kumar Jha here on Thursday, calling his return to the party a “homecoming”. Afterwards, he met Lalu and said, “The two of us had started fighting for social justice together in the early 1970s. We are still fighting, not just for social justice but also to save the Constitution.”

Ranjan said Lalu’s eldest daughter Misa Bharati would win the Patliputra Lok Sabha seat from where she is fighting on an RJD ticket. It is the constituency where he once defeated Lalu and himself faced Misa a decade ago.

Ranjan and Lalu became friends when the latter joined the Samajwadi Yuvjan Sabha, the students’ wing of the erstwhile Samyukta Socialist Party, in the late 1960s. Ranjan was a professor of geology at Patna University before he joined active politics and guided Lalu as he plunged into student politics.

He later recalled how the two of them spent hours together at his Nala Road home in Patna to discuss political strategy. After Lalu became CM in March 1990, the first house he chose to visit was that of Ranjan Yadav, whom he considered more of an elder brother than a friend. The RJD sent Ranjan Yadav to the Rajya Sabha from 1990 to 2002.

During Lalu Prasad’s first term as CM, Ranjan had a major say in matters of education. After Lalu was jailed in the fodder scam in 1996, he used to be called the “proxy CM”. But the two fell out when Lalu chose his wife Rabri Devi as the Bihar CM. He went on to join Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok