New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Bihar unit president Nityanand Rai has been given the charge of Minister of State for the Union Ministry for Home Affairs as a reward for winning 39 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Rai has successfully executed BJP national president Amit Shah’s plan on the ground and ensured a complete routing of opposition parties in Bihar.
He was given the responsibility of the party in 2016 when the BJP was said to be divided in several factions and its morale was at an all-time low after having lost to the grand alliance miserably in 2015.
Shah saw in Rai the spark and ignored several senior faces in Bihar to lead the party.
Rai had joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in 1981 and became a loyal soldier of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) from the time he entered the Raj Narain College Hajipur.
At this time, the RSS was trying hard to make its presence felt in the rural areas of Bihar.
In 1990, Rai was made the secretary of the youth wing of the BJP, in 1996, its general secretary and in 1999, became its president.
In 2000, Rai entered electoral politics and won from Hajipur Assembly constituency for three consecutive terms — 2000, 2005 and 2010.
In 2014, he won from the Ujiyarpur Lok Sabha constituency against RJD’s Alok Mehta by more than 60,000 votes.
This time, he was re-elected from the seat by defeating Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) president Upendra Kushwaha by over a lakh votes.
Rai’s name came into the limelight in 1990 when he averted an imminent arrest of senior BJP leader LK Advani in Hajipur.
Advani was on a nationwide ‘rath yatra’ and Rai had convened a mahapanchayat in Hajipur to oppose Advani’s arrest.
The then chief minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav, had sent RK Singh, district magistrate of Samastipur, to arrest Advani. Singh is now a BJP MP from Arrah and was a minister in the Narendra Modi government.
Lalu was at the peak of his political career and anybody challenging him from the Yadav clan (Rai belonged to the community) was unheard of at the time.
Despite Lalu’s dominance over Muslims and the Yadav community, Rai proved his might and forced the chief minister to change his plan of arresting Advani in Hajipur.
Rai has been a member of the standing committee on agriculture, ministry of petroleum and gas, member of standing committee on commerce, member of joint committee on Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Second Amendment) Bill, 2015.
Moments after winning from Ujiyarpur, he had credited Modi’s charisma for the huge victory.#ModiSarkarDobara – @nityanandraibjp takes the oath of office. | #ModiRajyaKnow More: https://t.co/yPF3i6eXzd pic.twitter.com/P6r9GFmRJr? News18 (@CNNnews18) May 30, 2019