A day after Bihar education official K K Pathak, the increasingly prominent additional chief secretary of the department, returned to work, scotching rumours of his resignation, the state government on Saturday removed Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Chandra Shekhar as the education minister and named him the minister of the low-profile sugarcane department. The government replaced him with senior RJD leader Alok Kumar Mehta, a long-trusted aide of party chief Lalu Prasad who held the ministry of revenue and land reforms.

Mehta, 57, has been elevated to the education department for a number of reasons, ranging from his experience to his proximity to Lalu. He is well qualified with a Bachelor’s degree in engineering and was also elected to the Lok Sabha as the Samastipur MP in 2004. A second-generation politician in his family, his father Tulsidas played an active role in the Janata Dal’s protest against BJP leader L K Advani’s rath yatra to Ayodhya in October 1990, and later served as a minister in Lalu’s Cabinet.

Mehta, who entered active politics in 1994, rose from a leader in the RJD’s youth wing to the state unit and then the national unit of the party. He began his electoral career as an MP when he won from Samastipur seat in 2004 with 50.6% of the vote share. A member of the OBC Kushwaha community, he is also prominent as the Kushwaha face of the party that is otherwise dominated by the Yadav-Muslim combination.

When Tejashwi Prasad Yadav decided to join active politics in 2012, Mehta was among a few senior leaders who took it upon themselves to guide and groom him. In the 2015 Assembly polls, when the ruling JD(U) and RJD fought in an alliance, Mehta won from the Ujiarpur Assembly seat with 52.4% of the vote share and became the cooperatives minister in the Nitish Kumar-led Mahagathbandhan government. He won again in the 2020 Assembly polls with 48.8% of the vote share.

Another reason Mehta emerged as the clear choice for the education department is his penchant to work behind the scenes and not get into any controversy. Chandra Shekhar, meanwhile, regularly made the headlines more for his controversial remarks than for any administrative reasons. From referring to some verses of the Ramcharitmanas as “casteist” and “potassium cyanide” and backing fellow RJD MLA Fateh Bahadur Kushwaha on his remarks against Hindu goddess Saraswati to taking on Pathak, the three-time Madhepura MLA had became more of a liability for the RJD.

An RJD insider said, “Lalu Prasad and Tejashwi wanted to remove him because CM Nitish Kumar wanted an education minister who can coordinate well with his education secretary at a time when a flurry of new appointments are being made and several education reforms are underway.”

The RJD, which has been sensing unease in the Mahagathbandhan, appears to be treading carefully so as not to ruffle Nitish’s feathers. Chandra Shekhar’s removal is more a matter of the RJD seeking peace with Nitish than to effect a change for better governance. As for Mehta, he has been brought in to restore equilibrium in the education department.

Recently, the RJD had been upset with the JD(U) for not giving it due credit in government advertisements on employment drive, the tagline of which read: “Rojgar matlab Nitish Kumar (employment means Nitish Kumar)”. On Friday, amid fresh speculations of the BJP “keeping its door open” for the JD(U), Lalu and Tejashwi met with Nitish. Tejashwi, however, told reporters that it was a “regular” meeting and that “all is well” in the alliance.

Sources in the RJD said Lalu and Tejashwi met Nitish after reading Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s interview to a Hindi daily in which he was asked if the BJP would welcome its old allies, including the JD(U). The Union Home Minister replied that if there was “any such proposal” from Nitish’s party, the BJP “would look” into it. When asked about the comment, Tejashwi sarcastically said at the time, “I do not know. Maybe you people have better knowledge of what Amit Shah wanted to imply.”

On Sunday, Nitish and Tejashwi shared the dais at the inauguration of a hospital at Sarairanjan in Samastipur.