Day after being named Bihar Congress chief Rajesh Kumar meets Kharge Rahul

New Delhi, Mar 19 (PTI) Newly-appointed Bihar Congress president Rajesh Kumar met party president Mallikarjun Kharge and former party chief Rahul Gandhi here on Wednesday and discussed the way forward to strengthen the organisation in the state, sources said.
    In a significant move ahead of the Bihar Assembly polls due later this year, the Congress named Kumar, a Dalit leader, as the new president of its state unit on Tuesday.
    Kumar (56), a second-term MLA from Kutumba in Aurangabad district, replaced Rajya Sabha MP and former Union minister Akhilesh Prasad Singh.
    The succession of Singh, an upper-caste leader known to be close to the Congress's senior Bihar ally RJD, by Kumar marks a strategic shift on the part of the grand old party, which is trying to aggressively reach out to the deprived sections of the society, making use of Gandhi's twin planks of "Samvidhan bachao (save the Constitution)" and the demand for a nationwide caste census.
    The change in the party's strategy was also felt in the appointment of Krishna Allavaru, a young, aggressive technocrat, as the new All India Congress Committee (AICC) in-charge of Bihar.
    Allavaru, who replaced the seasoned Mohan Prakash, made his intentions clear on a visit to Patna recently when he dismissed suggestions that the Congress is the "B team" of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and asserted that "we are the A team of the people".

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