Dalit leader Rajesh Kumar is new Bihar Congress chief

    New Delhi/Patna, Mar 18 (PTI) In a significant move ahead of the Bihar assembly polls due later this year, the Congress on Tuesday named Dalit leader Rajesh Kumar as the new president of its state unit..
    Fifty-six-year-old Kumar, a second-term MLA from Kutumba in Aurangabad district, replaces Rajya Sabha MP and former Union minister Akhilesh Prasad Singh.
    "Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge appointed Rajesh Kumar as the president of the Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee with immediate effect", a statement issued by the party said.
    The succession of Singh, an upper caste leader known to be close to senior Bihar ally RJD, by Kumar marks a strategic shift on the part of the Congress, which is trying to aggressively reach out to the deprived castes, making use of Rahul Gandhi's twin planks of "samvidhan bachao (save the Constitution)" and the demand for a nationwide caste census.
    The change in strategy was also felt in the appointment, last month of Krishna Allavaru, a young, aggressive technocrat, as the new AICC in charge of Bihar.
    Allavaru, who replaced the seasoned Mohan Prakash, made his intentions clear when on a visit to Patna recently, he dismissed suggestions that the Congress was RJD's "B team", asserting "we are the A team of the people".
    NDA leaders like Union minister Chirag Paswan have been noting the change in stance of the Congress, regarded by many as a spent force in Bihar, and predicting that the national party may prefer to go it alone if the RJD tried to extract too much for itself.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)