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Ravi Shankar Prasad

Ravi Shankar Prasad, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), holds three key positions in the Union government led by Narendra Modi in his second term in office — law & justice, communications, and electronics & information technology. In the previous stint of the government, he had held the same ministries.

Previously a Rajya Sabha member, Prasad contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from the high-profile seat of Patna Sahib in Bihar against former BJP member and incumbent Shatrughan Sinha, who contested on a Congress ticket this time. Prasad won the seat comprehensively, defeating Sinha by a margin of 284657 votes. Prasad polled 61.85 per cent of the votes cast in the constituency, Sinha received 32.87 per cent votes.
 
Prasad joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the students’ wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, in 1969. He went underground when Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency in 1975. A long time Bharatiya Janata Party politician, Prasad is presently a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from Bihar since April 3, 2012. He was elected to Rajya Sabha for the first time in April 2002. When the infamous Fodder Scam came into limelight in Bihar, he filed a Public Interest Litigation in Patna High Court and demanded a probe by the Central Bureau Investigation (CBI). He defended Lal Krishna Advani in court when the latter was arrested in Bihar during his Rath Yatra in 1990. Prasad became a Member of the BJP's National Executive Committee in 1995.  He was a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee set up in 2011 to examine matters relating to allocation and pricing of telecom licences and spectrum.
 
Prasad has been one of the government's spokespersons on various issues, including the alleged irregularities in the Rafale fighter jet deal signed between India and France, combating fake news, misuse of social media, especially for manipulating elections, and the reliability and security of electronic voting machines, among other things
 
Ravi Shankar Prasad was a member of the committee tasked with preparing BJP's manifesto for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The present government's flagship programme of Digital India, which aims to bring about good governance by using information technology, is also being implemented under his leadership. 
 
Ravi Shankar Prasad will contest the Lok Sabha elections from Patna Sahib constituency on a BJP ticket.
 
 

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