Bihar’s former Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav was on Sunday appointed as the national working president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal.
The RJD did not previously have the post of a national working president.
The appointment was announced during the inaugural session of the RJD’s national executive meeting, where party president Lalu Prasad Yadav handed over the appointment letter to his son in the presence of senior leaders. Bihar’s former Chief Minister and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s wife Rabri Devi was also present at the event.
The party described the appointment as the “dawn of a new era”.
The organisational reshuffle comes after the RJD’s poor performance in the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections.
Leading the Mahagathbandhan alliance with the Congress, the party won 25 of the 143 seats it contested.
However, the RJD emerged as the single largest party in terms of vote share, and Tejashwi Yadav retained his Raghopur seat.
The development also came amid tensions within the Lalu Prasad Yadav family.
In recent months, Tejashwi Yadav’s siblings, including his estranged elder brother Tej Pratap Yadav and sister Rohini Acharya, have made public remarks indicating discord within the family and the party.
In a social media post, Acharya, who is based in Singapore, criticised the appointment, congratulating “the sycophants and the ‘infiltrator gang’ on the coronation of the ‘prince turned puppet in their hands’”.
When asked about Acharya’s remarks, Tej Pratap Yadav said: “Yes, what she says is right.”
However, he said he would not comment on the matters concerning the RJD since he was no longer in the party, PTI reported.
Tej Pratap Yadav, a former state minister, was expelled by his father from the party in May for six years for “ignoring moral values” in his personal life.
This came after a controversy erupted surrounding a post from Tej Pratap Yadav’s Facebook profile, which featured a photo of him with a woman named Anushka Yadav. The post, which was later deleted, said that she and the former state minister had been in a relationship for 12 years.
Several social media users referred to Tej Pratap Yadav’s marriage to Aishwarya Rai, daughter of former Bihar minister Chandrika Rai, in May 2018. They asked why he had married her if he was in a relationship with another woman at the time.
Tej Pratap Yadav and Aishwarya Rai separated months after getting married and their divorce proceedings are underway in a Patna court.
At the time, Tej Pratap Yadav claimed that his social media profiles had been hacked, and that his photographs had been “wrongly edited to harass and defame me and my family members”. He urged his well-wishers and followers not to “pay heed to rumours”.
In September, Tej Pratap Yadav founded the Janshakti Janata Dal.
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