Hazaribagh: An INDIA bloc rally in Jharkhand saw a new face on the stage earlier this month. Dressed in a white and green kurta, a young, poised man accepted a scarf with the ‘hand’ symbol of the Congress and raised his arms while posing with other INDIA bloc leaders.
It was the first public appearance of Aashir Sinha, grandson of former Union minister Yashwant Sinha. His appearance, days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) denied his father Jayant Sinha a ticket from the family borough of Hazaribagh, led to frenzied speculations that Aashir had picked a side and would make his political debut.
Aashir has spent most of his 23 years in the US and is a model and entrepreneur. Back in Hazaribagh’s Rishabh Vatika, where the tree-lined Sinha house stands, Aashir now lives close to his grandfather, quietly observing his ways. He greets visitors with a ‘namaste‘, attends Yashwant Sinha’s interviews and press conferences, and is also honing his Hindi-speaking skills.
His grandfather, however, has been quick to deny claims of his grandson stepping into the political fray. In an interview with ThePrint, he said, “He (Aashir) has just returned after finishing his studies in the US. And he has a professional career ahead. If my view prevails in the family, I will say he is still too young. Even two years later, he will still be too young.”
Stressing the importance of having a professional career before joining politics, the former Union minister said he hoped his grandson would follow his and his son’s path.
“Both Jayant and I have shown that it is good to enter politics after having a lot of experience in another field. That’s likely to make you more successful in politics,” he added.
Bureaucrat-turned-politician Yashwant Sinha first won Hazaribagh in 1998 and then again in 1999 and 2009. In 2014, his son Jayant took the baton and represented Hazaribagh until 2019. In all these years, it was only once in 2004 that the family lost the seat when United Progressive Alliance-backed Communist Party of India candidate Bhuvaneshwar Mehta defeated Yashwant Sinha.
For the first time since 1998, nobody from the Sinha family is contesting the seat. The BJP has fielded Manish Jaiswal, a two-time MLA from Hazaribagh, while the Congress has announced the candidacy of Jai Prakash Bhai Patel, a three-term MLA from Mandu.
Voting will take place 20 May in the fifth phase of the Lok Sabha election. However, the exit of the Sinha family from the political fray and the choice of candidates have led to the elections in Hazaribagh making headlines. While BJP veteran workers said they feel sidelined, the Sinha family is seeing a split on political lines. While Yashwant Sinha has pledged his support for the Congress candidate, his son, in a video released on X, appealed to voters to ensure a big victory for the BJP.
Meanwhile, Yashwant Sinha told ThePrint that the future course of action for both him and his son would be charted on the basis of the results of the Lok Sabha elections.
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‘A Diwali gift’
The legacy of the Sinhas in Hazaribagh began with Yashwant Sinha. While most people believe it started in 1998, Sinha contested his first Lok Sabha elections from Hazaribagh in 1984 but ended up with roughly 10,000 votes only.
“I might have lost that election, but I found my constituency. And, after that, I did not look back, in the sense that I did not, like many other leaders, go looking for a Lok Sabha constituency or hopping from one to another. I have stuck with Hazaribagh,” he told ThePrint.
By the time he got into politics, Yashwant Sinha had already spent over 24 years as an IAS officer and served as joint secretary with the Central government. He retired after becoming joint secretary as he felt that from then on, he would be doing the same work as an additional secretary or secretary in the government.
“I did not want to go through that experience again and again. I had 12 years of service left when I decided to call it a day,” he told ThePrint.
A close aide of the family told ThePrint that Sinha chose Hazaribagh because of his familiarity with the area, among other things. Not only was he posted in the nearby district of Giridih, a part of the Hazaribagh district in 1972, but also Jayant was born to him and his wife Nilima Sinha in Giridih.
The aide said that after his loss in 1984, Sinha took it upon himself to connect with the people of Hazaribagh. He went on ‘padyatras’ and bike rallies and laid the foundation for an association that would last generations.
He was initially associated with the Janata Party, followed by the Janata Dal after its formation in 1989, and then he joined the BJP.
Recalling the day the BJP inducted Sinha in the early 1990s, Bhaiya Banke Bihari, former district president of the BJP in Hazaribagh, said that senior party leader L.K. Advani, at the time, described Sinha as a “Diwali gift”.
In the Vajpayee cabinet, Sinha had two terms as finance minister between 1998 and 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he served as the external affairs minister.
Within Hazaribagh, despite several years having passed, residents still credit Yashwant Sinha for bringing a railway station to the area.
The fork in the road
While Yashwant Sinha was diving into politics, Jayant was building a corporate career. Jayant began his education at IIT=Delhi. He then went to the US and got a Master of Science in energy management and policy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1992. He spent the next two decades working at several global organisations, such as McKinsey & Company and the Omidyar Network, before taking the plunge into politics.
His career aligns with Yashwant Sinha’s belief that it helps to have a professional career ahead of a political one. Jayant won from Hazaribagh in 2014 and again in 2019 when he won with a much larger margin of 4.79 lakh votes (67.4 percent of the share), nearly equal to the margin by which PM Narendra Modi won in Varanasi in 2019.
In February, Jayant received the Sansad Maharatna Award, given to five of the 786 MPs in the 17th Lok Sabha for their work.
In 2018, a fork in the road appeared for the family. While Jayant stayed on with the BJP, Yashwant formally left the party. The latter has since been a vocal critic of the Modi government on issues ranging from economic policies such as demonetisation and laws like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. In 2021, he joined Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress but resigned from all party positions in 2022 when the Opposition named him the joint presidential candidate.
A family split
Just before the BJP named Jaiswal as its candidate from Hazaribagh, Jayant posted on X that he requested party president J.P. Nadda to relieve him of his direct electoral duties so he could focus his efforts “on combating global climate change in Bharat and around the world”.
“Of course, I will continue to work with the party on economic and governance issues,” he added in his 2 March post. On 8 March, Jayant Sinha also posted a video on X with Jaiswal, wishing the latter good luck in the election.
However, speaking about his son not getting the BJP ticket, Yashwant Sinha said, “This time, he (Jayant) decided to opt out or was told to opt out, so he is not in the field.”
A month after the BJP decision, Yashwant Sinha, in an address to the media at his residence in Hazaribagh, declared his support for the Congress candidate. “I have come forward in the role of a guardian in accordance with the sentiments of the people of Hazaribagh… My only aim has been to progress the constituency, and I will use my remaining energy to make J.P. Patel victorious,” he said.
This political split in the family has existed since 2018, Yashwant Sinha said. On whether this makes dinner-time conversations interesting, he said the family has a rule — “We keep politics strictly out of dinner”.
Outside the house, days after Jayant Sinha did not get a ticket, Yashwant Sinha also took control over ‘Atal Bhawan’, which the BJP has been using as its office since 2010-2011. Close aides of the family said Sinha had given most of the funds for the two-storey building, owned it, and named it too.
The building is still painted orange at the borders, but the party flags have disappeared, and the abandoned BJP hoardings turned upside down. BJP’s election work has now shifted to Jaiswal’s home office in Hazaribagh.
The elusive airport
In the ten years that Jayant Sinha held the seat, he claimed to have achieved several landmarks for his constituency.
He takes pride in having brought the new age Vande Bharat train to Hazaribagh, giving its residents a direct rail link between Patna, Gaya and Ranchi from where they can get long-distance trains like Rajdhani Express to reach other parts of the country. Hazaribagh has also seen the establishment of the Center for Tribal Studies, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, the Patratu super thermal power plant, a medical college, a national highway, and an Akshaya Patra kitchen.
However, most Hazaribagh residents whom ThePrint spoke with had one major grievance — the lack of an airport — the demand for which has been ignored for decades. The nearest domestic airport is the Birsa Munda Airport in Ranchi, over 90 km from Hazaribagh.
Jayant seems to have dreamt of taking his father’s legacy forward with the promise of an airport in 2018 when he said that while his father had given the gift of railways to Hazaribagh, he would give the gift of an airport to the people in his constituency. According to reports, he had even managed to get the project sanctioned, but it has been pending over land acquisition proceedings.
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‘Don’t want BJP candidate to win’
Meanwhile in Hazaribagh, several residents seemed to not care too much about the candidates — either because they feel none have worked to meet their interests or because they base their electoral choices on who leads at the Centre.
Several men sitting huddled around a ludo board in Hazaribagh’s Meru village voiced their support for Modi instead of any candidate.
“Modiji has done so much for the country. He got nuclear weapons to the country; he got fighter jets… He completed everything pending, Ram Temple, Article 370,” Hazaribagh resident Yogendra Prasad said.
Another resident Umesh Prasad added with gusto that India is ranked third in the world, trailing behind the US and China, but he could not be sure on what parameter. Ajay Prasad claimed that India ranks sixth in the “economy”.
However, 48-year-old Rajesh Kumar Mehta, a resident of Matwari, said the BJP’s vote share could go down “because of the candidates”. At the same time, he recalled that during COVID-19, people received double ration, which came as a relief.
Another resident, 58-year-old Shankar Ram, said Jayant Sinha remains popular due to Yashwant Sinha’s connection with the constituency. He recalled that the senior Sinha is behind the building of a Durga temple, roads, and the famed railway station.
As for Jaiswal, his contributions to women’s marriages in Hazaribagh seem to have become folklore, with people recalling he not only bears the expenses to get couples — sometimes, two dozen at a time — married but also contributes to the ‘dowry’. “You just have to give him the wedding card, and he takes care of it,” Raj Kumar Gupta of Meru village said.
Yashwant Sinha putting his weight behind Patel has also made the polls more interesting. Sinha accepted that the Congress has had no standing in Hazaribagh and that in the many years the party has been contesting the seat, it has been “a very poor second”.
“At this time, though, for various reasons, the Congress is giving a tough time to the BJP candidate. I would not be surprised if he wins the election,” he told ThePrint.
“I have given my support to him because of various reasons. I don’t want the BJP candidate to win because he will not be a good MP. That’s what my opinion is,” Sinha added.
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‘Neglected, sidelined’
There has been disquiet among the BJP workers in Hazaribagh since the party denied Jayant Sinha a ticket. Nearly 15 days ago, 150 party workers resigned in protest.
“It (BJP) should have, at least, told us why he (Jayant) was denied a ticket. Nobody had any answers for us,” a resident who has been with the BJP in Hazaribagh for over three decades said.
Others who have chosen to stay on in the BJP also have complaints. Their lament is most of the tickets went to those who joined the BJP from the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha-Prajatantrik (JVM-P). The grievance lingers even though Jaiswal switched sides a decade ago, back in 2013. He has since won the assembly elections from Hazaribagh.
The scars appear to have resurfaced after former chief minister Babulal Marandi rejoined the BJP in 2020 while his party, JVM-P, merged with the BJP.
BJP former district president Bhaiya Banke Bihari said Marandi when he left the BJP in 2006 told the media that he would prefer jumping off from the Qutub Minar over joining the BJP.
He said he feels the BJP is “neglecting” its cadre in Jharkhand and that there’s a dilution of its core principles. “They’re not talking to the veteran party people, who are sidelined… It’s very hurtful.”
Bihari asserted that the Sinha family has a “personal relationship” with Hazaribagh, and so their word holds value in the constituency.
The future of the family
As for the future of the Sinha family, Yashwant Sinha said they are planning to wait for the election results — both in Hazaribagh and at the national level.
“I think we’ll wait for the result of these elections, see which way this constituency turns, see which way the national elections go. And I think it could be after that, it will be proper for both Jayant and me to take a look at the future,” he told ThePrint.
The former Union minister also said that Jayant is 61 now and still young, with many years to go if he opts to remain in politics.
However, he emphasised that Aashir is just 23, two years short of even being eligible to contest elections in India.
When asked if Aashir is keeping the door to politics open, he said, “It depends on him — after 10 years or 20 years, what he would think.”
His plans for the next ten years — “Just manage to live,” the senior Sinha said, with a laugh.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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