It has been a roller-coaster political ride for Samrat Chaudhary, who started his political career as a minister in Bihar nearly three decades ago, before he was sacked by the then governor following allegations about his eligibility.
Things appear to have come full circle for the 57-year-old leader, whose meteoric rise in the BJP after joining it nine years ago saw him become the party’s first chief minister in the state.
Chaudhary, formerly known as Rakesh Kumar, first made headlines in 1999, when then Prime Minister Rabri Devi appointed him to her cabinet.
Samrat Chaudhary’s cabinet post was said to be a reward for his parents, Shakuni and Parvati Devi, an MP and MLA respectively from Samata Party, who had agreed to switch their allegiance to the RJD.
However, a complaint soon reached Raj Bhavan (now Lok Bhavan) that Chaudhary, who was not then a member of the State Legislative Council, had not completed the required age.
Accordingly, the then Governor Suraj Bhan ordered Chaudhary’s dismissal, in a rare case of dismissing a minister without the government recommending it.
After his unceremonious dismissal, the RJD, headed by Lalu Prasad, Rabri Devi’s husband, fielded him in the 2000 Assembly elections, and Chaudhary was reappointed as minister, this time to serve a full term.
In 2005, the RJD lost power to the JD(U)-BJP union, but Chaudhary remained with the RJD and was appointed party president five years later.
By 2014, Chaudhary appeared to have disillusioned with the RJD, led a split in the party and joined the JD(U) government, then headed by Jitan Ram Manjhi.
Manjhi resigned months later after his patron Nitish Kumar decided to return as chief minister. This caused Chaudhry to lose his ministerial position.
In 2017, he joined the BJP and, as a member of the Queer community, a powerful OBC group that the party has always sought to woo, he rose to become the state’s vice president a year later.
Chaudhary then turned from a staunch critic of Nitish Kumar, while the JD(U) supremo was outside the NDA, to a trusted aide of the alliance partner whose support was vital to his rise to the top.
Chaudhary, who is over six feet tall, was always seen in public wearing a turban on his head until a few years ago. In private, the BJP leader was joking that he would remove his headdress only after the supremo was removed from power.
In 2024, when Nitish Kumar returned to the NDA “for good”, Chaudhary, now the state BJP president, replacing several old party hands, was appointed deputy chief minister.
The nomination of Chaudhary and Vijay Kumar Sinha, another outspoken critic of Nitish Kumar, as deputy chief ministers was seen by some political commentators as an attempt by the BJP to offer reconciliation, while cynics saw it as an attempt to belittle the JD(U).
Chaudhary took up his new role as fisherman and, in less than two years, emerged as a leader whom Nitish Kumar could trust enough to give up the important Home Ministry portfolio, which he had chosen to keep for himself since 2005.
Besides the home ministry portfolio that was allotted to him in November last year after the NDA won a stunning victory in the elections, another incident helped Chaudhary attract public attention in the midst of the Assembly polls.
While canvassing for votes in Tarapur, the assembly seat represented by his father Shakuni Chaudhary a record six times, Union Home Minister Amit Shah urged people to vote for his son, promising that he would become a “big man”.
Chowdhury, who returned to direct elections after spending nearly a decade in the legislative council, won Tarapur by an overall margin of 45,000 votes.
The new Prime Minister was born in a village in Bihar’s Munger district to Parvati Devi and Shakuni Chaudhary, an army man-turned-politician who started out as a Congress member and later switched allegiance to Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar.
Chaudhary now faces the enormous challenge of turning Bihar into a BJP stronghold like the rest of India, while accommodating allies like the JD(U), which is likely to feel a tinge of resentment that it is no longer the “prime minister’s party,” and smaller allies who have been vulnerable to shifting loyalties over trifles.
Fending off attacks from critics like Jan Suraj Party founder Prashant Kishor, who has raised issues like discrepancies in his age as stated in various election affidavits and his alleged involvement in criminal cases, will be another challenge that Chaudhary will have to face.
