Marandi returned to BJP, but the path ahead is strewn with thorns

Marandi returned to the BJP after 14 years and the party now wants him to lead the state unit. But a generation of new leaders isn't familiar with him

Raghubar Das, former Jharkhand chief minister, was celebrated as a “promising” leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — in a cast that encompassed a demographic scale spanning Pramod Sawant, Goa chief minister, in his early 40s to Das, the oldest, at 65.
 

Das’s selection was an audacious experiment that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the then BJP president, Amit Shah, went ahead with. Das, who belonged to an OBC caste, was the first non-tribal CM of a state that has a 26 per cent Adivasi population. After the BJP lost the Assembly election in 2019 under Das’s stewardship, party