Veteran RJD leader Sharad Yadav passes away

Veteran leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) party in India passed away on Thursday, his daughter Subhashini Sharad Yadav informed through a social media post.

He was a former union minister in various governments.

Yadav was a prominent socialist leader who rose on the anti-Congress plank of the 1970s and remained a key presence in national politics for decades as he travelled through various offshoots of Lok Dal and Janata Party before diminished political equity and ill-health combined to push him to the margins in his last few years.

The veteran leader breathed his last on Thursday at a private hospital in Gurugram where he was rushed after he collapsed at his Chhatarpur residence in Delhi.

The socialist leader was suffering from kidney-related issues for a long time and regularly underwent dialysis.

Yadav served as a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in the late 1990s. He was also a minister in the VP Singh government in 1989 and his backing to Lalu Prasad Yadav was seen as important to the latter becoming Bihar's chief minister in 1990 for the first time.

Both were to soon fall out as the Bihar leader dominated the politics in his state, overshadowing others and ensuring that it was his writ that ran.

Incumbent Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Yadav besides late Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan were three key socialist leaders from the state who charted their own paths to take on the charismatic friend-turned-foe.

While Yadav was born in Madhya Pradesh and began his political career from there, Bihar became his 'karma bhoomi'.

He and Lalu Prasad Yadav locked horns in Lok Sabha polls and his win over the Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo in 1999 was a high point of his career.

His association with Kumar and their alliance with the BJP ended the 15-year long combined reign of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi, who had taken over as chief minister after he was embroiled in corruption cases.

Never a leader with a big base of his own, Yadav depended on state bigwigs like Lalu and Nitish to enter Parliament but enjoyed the aura and political weight which made him a strong presence at the high table of national politics in Delhi.

He was the convener of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance before he had to reluctantly leave after Kumar decided to snap ties with the party in 2013.

He was instrumental in Kumar's alliance with arch rival Lalu Prasad Yadav as they joined hands to decimate the BJP in the 2015 assembly polls in Bihar.

Ironically, it was Kumar's decision to join hands with the BJP again in 2017 that snapped his patience with him as he decided to remain in the opposition camp and backed some of his supporters to float the Loktantrik Janata Dal.

The new party, however, could never take off and his poor health virtually put an end to his active politics. He merged his party with the RJD in 2022.

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