New Delhi: Congress president Sonia Gandhi yesterday named a new team for election-bound Bihar by removing both the party in-charge for the state and the state unit chief.
While federal minister Mukul Wasnik has replaced Jagdish Tytler as the party's in-charge for Bihar, the party's national secretary Mehboob Ali Kaiser has been named as the new state unit president in place of Anil Sharma.
Tytler will now head the Congress Seva Dal, an organ of party volunteers.
Intense in-fighting and factionalism, with Tytler and Sharma playing leading roles in these, was threatening to undermine the party's impressive growth in Bihar.
The new appointments are being seen as strategic with an eye on wooing Muslim and lower caste Hindu votes that had slipped away from the Congress party leading to its dismal existence in one of the most politically crucial states. While Kaiser belongs to the Muslim community, Wasnik is a Dalit leader from Maharashtra.
Bihar is due to go to polls in October-November this year and all major players have already upped their ante in the state.
With Bahujan Samaj Party, quintessentially a party of Dalits, yet to make inroads in Bihar despite being in power in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, all parties are trying to sway the Dalit votebank.
If the Congress has brought in Wasnik as in-charge of the party, the state's erstwhile ruling party Rashtriya Janata Dal has virtually sacrificed a Rajya Sabha seat by deciding to support the candidature of Bihar's most known Dalit face, former federal minister Ram Vilas Paswan.
