Published: January 20, 2024 8:25 PM IST 
New Delhi/Patna: Less than a month after Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took over as Janata Dal (United) president, the party on Saturday announced a list of its new national office bearers. The list, approved by Kumar, named Rajya Sabha MP and Vashishth Narayan Singh as the new national vice president of the party.
Singh, a veteran socialist leader and a close aide of Nitish Kumar, had stepped down as the state unit chief three years ago citing health reasons. Singh’s friendship with the JD(U) chief dates back to the 1974 students’ movement in Bihar led by Jayaprakash Narayan.
He replaces Mangani Lal Mandal who in March last year became only the second leader to have been made the JD(U)’s vice president after former poll strategist Prashant Kishor, who was given the post in 2017.
Mandal has been named as the new national general secretary of the party.
K C Tyagi, the JDU’s most visible face in the media, has been designated as “political advisor and spokesperson” of the party.
Former Nalanda MLA Rajib Ranjan, who returned to the party last year after quitting the BJP, has been stripped of his national general secretary post and named as another spokesperson of the party.
As per the list, the party has trimmed down the number of national general secretaries to 11, compared with 20 in the previous list that came out in March last year when the party was headed by Rajiv Ranjan Singh ‘Lalan’, who stepped down last month to concentrate on his Lok Sabha seat Munger, amid rumours that he had grown too close to ally RJD.
Lalan, however, continues to enjoy the trust of Nitish Kumar and has accompanied the supreme leader at meetings of the INDIA bloc, besides Sanjay Kumar Jha, who has been retained as a national general secretary.
Jha is the only Bihar minister to figure in the list of national general secretaries.
Others who have been retained to the key post include Rajya Sabha member Ram Nath Thakur, whose late father Karpoori Thakur had served as a Chief Minister and been mentor to the likes of Nitish Kumar and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad.
A surprise inclusion in the list of general secretaries is Kapil Harishchandra Patil, a member of the Maharashtra legislative council, known to be a loyalist of late leader Sharad Yadav, who headed the JD(U) for the longest period of time but had severed ties with the party towards the end of his career.
In an apparent signal to the minorities that the party cares for them, Mohammad Ali Ashraf Fatmi, Afaque Ahmed Khan and Kahkashan Parveen have also been retained as national general secretaries.
While Khan has been an old JD(U) loyalist, Fatmi, a former Union minister, joined the party in 2019 when he quit the RJD alleging brusque behaviour by Tejashwi Yadav, who is now the Bihar Deputy CM.
Parveen’s claim to fame was her election to the Rajya Sabha in 2014, at a young age of 35, which was viewed as Kumar’s attempt to endear himself to the minorities after having snapped ties with BJP.
Alok Kumar Suman, the MP from the reserved Gopalganj seat, has been retained as the treasurer, becoming the only sitting Lok Sabha member in the new list of office bearers.
The list also includes six national secretaries, including Rajiv Ranjan Prasad, who can be often seen representing the party in debates on news channels.
Another noteworthy name among national secretaries is that of Sunil Kumar alias “engineer”, a former MLA from Harnaut, the assembly seat which Nitish Kumar had represented in the 1980s.
(With PTI inputs)
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