Reeling under the crushing defeat it met in Bihar’s Assembly polls, the RJD hopes to revive itself in its lost home turf by the organisational skills of senior leader Ramchandra Purve, a 63-year-old former minister and staunch loyalist of party chief Lalu Prasad Yadav.
Mr Purve, who had once made headlines by equating Mr Yadav’s journey to the Ranchi jail in connection with the fodder scam case with Mahatma Gandhi’s historic Dandi march, was appointed as the RJD’s new Bihar unit chief on Tuesday. The post fell vacant as its occupant, RJD stalwart Abdul Bari Siddiqui, resigned after being nominated as the Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly.
As Bihar’s education minister in Mr Yadav’s Cabinet in the 1990s, Mr Purve had led the changes in the state’s school textbooks to incorporate a biographical chapter on Yadav – Mitti Ke Gaurav (Pride of the Soil) – that highly glorified the RJD supremo’s personality and leadership qualities in the Hindi book for Class 8. When the Opposition parties protested to questions in an examination being selected from this chapter, an irreverent Mr Purve had said: “We have not written in the question paper that Nathuram Godse is the founder of the Indian Constitution”.
Taking his new charge at the RJD state headquarters, Mr Purve, who lost the Assembly polls in Parihar in Sitamarhi district to the BJP’s Ramnaresh Yadav, vowed to revive the party and bring it back to its days of glory and might. “We have taken our electoral debacle not as a loss but as a challenge. The victory claimed by the NDA is truly not a reflection of the wishes of the people because as much as 61 per cent of the votes were cast in favour of the NDA’s opponents,” said Mr Purve.
“The NDA government’s claims of development in Bihar during its previous term are based more on hype than on ground realities. Bihar continues to be a backward state and the rural people are still in a poverty and persecution. We, as Opposition, will continue highlighting the people’s issues,” said Mr Purve, who holds an MSc. degree.