While Nitish Kumar will remain the party’s face, all decisions regarding party affairs will be taken by Kishor.
Prashant Kishor Pandey, who was last week appointed as the national vice-president of Bihar’s ruling party Janata Dal United (JDU) by none other than party supremo and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar—the first such appointment in the party ever since Kumar replaced Sharad Yadav as party president in April 2016—has become the number 2, not only in the party but in the state too, just after Kumar himself, for all practical purposes. “Nitish Kumar will work with the aid and advice of Pandey. That is how things will be,” a senior party leader said, summing up the developments.
While Nitish Kumar will remain the face of the party, all the decisions regarding party affairs, appointments and administration in Bihar will be taken by Pandey, who “always wanted to enter politics to bring changes in the lives of people”, he confided.
“New political alignments, new equations and new appointments in various departments, both within the party and in the state, are round the corner,” the leader added.
He, however, ruled out any “revolt” in the party over Pandey’s appointment as the next in line to replace Kumar because most of the top JDU leaders do not have a mass base of their own and are totally dependent on Kumar’s discretion for their roles in the both party as well as the government.
Supporting this view, another party leader based in Patna said, “Obviously, there is heartburn as he (Pandey) has virtually superseded everyone who was associated with the party for so many years. But who will speak against it? R.C.P. Singh? Harivansh? Anyone who does so will be expelled. Nitish Kumar has made this clear.”
Sources said that Pandey, who in his first public interaction at the ISB Leadership Summit in Hyderabad on 9 September had stated that he would quit political campaigning, had already had more than 10 meetings till then with Kumar and party general secretary K.C. Tyagi over his future role in JDU.
The sources asserted that it must be only after getting “sufficient indication” about his future role that he would have announced in Hyderabad about his plans to quit campaigning. Kumar anointed Pandey on the post exactly a month after the 41-year-old political strategist officially joined the party on 16 September.
According to sources, though he has officially quit campaigning, Pandey continues to guide the team members of the organisation he had founded—Indian People’s Action Committee (IPAC), which is presently based in Hyderabad—but is likely to move to Bihar to help JDU in the 2019 polls.
In the first week of September, days before the ISB interaction, Pandey had an open session at a 3-star hotel in Mehdipatnam in Hyderabad where the whole team of IPAC was present. They discussed threadbare the future of IPAC and issues like who the IPAC should work for.
The sources added that after his statement at ISB, an internal voting—including voting booths, secret ballot, voter slips, etc—was conducted in IPAC in which the employees were asked to decide on whom the IPAC should work for—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Congress. However, some participants who took part in the voting said that it was an exercise done by Pandey to gauge the team members’ views on whom he should join.
“He has taken a wise decision. If he had joined the BJP or the Congress, he would not have been able to rise beyond a certain point. However, in his new role in the JDU, he might become the next Chief Minister of Bihar,” a Patna-based journalist said. Pandey joins the young club of Tejashwi Yadav (28) of Rashtriya Janata Dal and Chirag Paswan (35) of Lok Janshakti Party who are handling the affairs of their respective parties in the state, something which the BJP is missing there.