Around 10 years back, there was an inter school cricket match which was organised at a stadium in Patna. Suddenly the crowd became hysterical when a young batsman hit ball out of boundary and landed at the feet of former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was watching the match in the VIP gallery. The politician picked up the ball and threw it back in glee. “See, my son just saluted me,” a happy Lalu told some politicians sitting next to him. The batsman was his son Tejashwi Yadav.
Born on November 9, 1989 to former Bihar CMs Lalu Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi, Tejashwi Yadav initially picked cricket as his career. As a 13-year-old, Tejashwi made his debut in the U-15 team led by present India captain Virat Kohli. Most regular on the Delhi circuit insist that his graduation to the under-17 and then the under-19 Delhi team had little to do with his family name. His rise to the next level — as a standby with the World Cup winning India U-19 side in 2008, his first class debut for Jharkhand and his long stint on the Delhi Daredevils bench without playing a game He studied up to ninth grade, and then dropped out of school without completing his primary education, to pursue his career in cricket.
Tejashwi Yadav made his political debut when he contested from RJD’s stronghold Raghopur seat in 2015 and defeated BJP’s Satish Kum by a margin of 22,733 votes. With this win in his first election stint, Tejashwi was chosen as the deputy to chief minister Nitish Kumar, whose party JD(U), contested the elections in alliance with the RJD and Congress and emerged as the winners, with RJD candidates winning on 80 seats, JDU on 71 and Congress on 27 seats.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, Tejashwi’s magic flopped miserably, as the RJD failed to even win one of the 40 Lok Sabha seats under his leadership. He vanished for more than a month and resurfaced in late June, explaining his disappearances on treatment for a leg injury. Since then, the junior Yadav has been slowly building up the pressure on Nitish Kumar by raking up issues like unemployment in the state.
Now it will be worth the wait to see if Tejashwi could sway the people of Bihar against Nitish Kumar and the BJP amid the anti-incumbency sentiment and growing voices over the issues of unemployment and lack of education in the state.
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