Patna: Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi seems to have a knack for getting into trouble.

A fortnight after he revealed that he bribed officials to get his work done, Manjhi, who got the throne as a “surprise gift” from his predecessor, has stirred up fresh controversy by saying that Dalit youths should marry people from other castes and increase their population.

“Dalit youths should go for more and more inter-caste marriages. We need to bring our population from the existing 16 per cent to 22 per cent if we have to emerge as a political force,” the chief minister said at a function organised to mark the unveiling of the statue of Dalit icon Bhim Rao Ambedkar on Thursday evening.

Manjhi’s comments hightlight how caste, not development, remain central to politics in the state. Right now, Dalits are the most sought-after community after Muslims and Yadavs — these two groups account for some 32 per cent of the state’s total population.

It was because of the importance placed on these groups in today’s politics that Manjhi was able to get his post from his predecessor, Nitish Kumar, who resigned after taking responsibility for his party’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha polls. Manjhi was given the post even though there were many capable faces in the ruling Janata Dal (United), observers say.

Strangely, Manjhi’s remarks are in sharp contrast to the observations made by Kumar who described the high population growth rate in Bihar as a matter of grave concern and called for a massive awareness campaign to arrest the population boom.

“If the [high] population growth rate continues in the years to come, our population will double by 2051 and put insurmountable pressures on infrastructure, resources and land, in particular, that cannot be stretched to accommodate the growing number of people,” Kumar said at a conference of paediatricians in March last year. He added, “The 25.05 per cent decadal population growth in Bihar is a matter of serious concern”.

This is the third time in the past fortnight that Manjhi has been at the centre of a scandal, much to the embarrassment of his party. The party faced major embarrassment when he told a meeting of newly-recruited officials about how he had given a bribe of Rs5,000 (Dh303) to settle his inflated electricity bill at home.

Even before the bribe issue could settle down, he came to the defence of his son who was caught with a woman constable in a hotel. “Anyone can have a girlfriend. Don’t young couples mingle at city parks every day? I don’t remember anyone raising objections to it,” Manjhi said.