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Who is Nitish Kumar?
Born on March 1,1951, Nitish Kumar is an Indian politician serving as the Chief Minister (CM) of Bihar since February 22, 2015. On August 10, 2022, he took oath as the CM of Bihar for the eighth time in 22 years.
A member of the Janata Dal (United) party, Kumar has been in office since 2005. Prior to that, he was the Union Railway Minister from 2001 to 2004 in the Atal Bihar Vajpayee government.
He had also held the agriculture portfolio in the central government in two phases — from 19 March 1998 to 5 August 1999, and from 27 May 2000 to 21 July 2001. He was the Union Minister of Surface Transport from 22 November 1999 to 3 March 2000.
Education
Nitish Kumar earned a degree in electrical engineering from Bihar College of Engineering in 1972. He joined the Bihar State Electricity Board and later moved into politics.
Political career
Nitish Kumar used to work closely with Ram Manohar Lohia, S N Sinha, Karpuri Thakur and V P Singh. Kumar also took part in Jayaprakash Narayan's movement between 1974 and 1977 and later joined the Janata party headed by Satyendra Narain Sinha.
In 1985, Kumar fought and won his first election to the state assembly from Harnaut. He later switched his loyalty to BJP in 1996 after winning his first Lok Sabha seat from Barh.
Nitish Kumar's popularity peaked when he was awarded the post of Minister of Railways in the United Front government in 1996 and was subsequently made the leader of Lok Sabha.
He had served as Bihar CM for little over seven days in March 2000, after which he was elected in 2005 when he served a full term. However, after corruption allegations were levelled against his deputy Tejashwi Yadav in 2015, Nitish resigned only to be sworn in as Chief Minister merely 12 hours later joining hands with the BJP to form a government in the state.
Equation with BJP
Nitish Kumar has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and he has also been critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the past. In 2013, Kumar had severed JD(U)’s 17-year-old alliance with the BJP, but he re-joined the NDA in 2017 after ending the grand alliance with the RJD and Congress.
Kumar ended his alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP) NDA on August 9, 2022 and submitted his resignation as the chief minister heading the NDA coalition and rejoined hands with RJD on a day of rapidly changing political developments in Bihar.