Tejashwi’s next move: Take credit for jobs, raise development pitch and wait for Nitish to falter on his own

NITISH Kumar’s betrayal of his partner RJD — again — to stake claim to form a government with the BJP is a test for the leadership for the RJD’s young heir Tejashwi Yadav, who came into his own only in the 2020 Assembly elections, with the phasing out of Lalu Prasad, his ailing father and Nitish’s contemporary who has perhaps seen the JD(U) supremo do this enough times to not be fazed.

For those who have been seeing Tejashwi trying to fill the large shoes of Lalu, the 34-year-old has shown the political dexterity he displayed in the last Assembly elections when he was credited with leading the RJD to single-largest party. In the days leading up to Nitish’s revolt Sunday, Tejashwi, who also lost his deputy chief ministership in the process, warded off pressure from several party MLAs who wanted him to stake claim to form the government by virtue of it still being the single-largest party in the Assembly, with 79 MLAs in the 243-member House. He is said to have outrightly rejected the suggestion and said his party would “rather go to the people and tell them what they had done during the one-and-a-half-year tenure (2022 till now) of the Mahagathbandhan government”.

There is also a clear positioning of Tejashwi as the development man, putting a distance between him and his father’s regime, qualified as “jungle raj”. On Sunday, Bihar woke up to a full-page advertisement in local dailies by the RJD apart from a social media campaign crediting him for the development in the state, particularly in working towards fulfilling his poll-time promise of providing 10 lakh jobs. “It is about taking credit for creating four lakh jobs in Bihar in a brief period of one-and-a-half years. Nitish was forced to adopt our 2020 slogan of