Rise of Renu Devi from a widowed insurance agent to Bihar deputy CM

BETTIAH: Trailing her during the 2000 Bihar polls, TOI had profiled Renu Devi as someone destined to rise on the political horizon of Bihar. Locally described as a ‘Lambi race ki ghodi’, she has galloped to her victorious destiny from her canter 20 years ago. Meet the new deputy chief minister of the state.

Her father Krishna Prasad— a junior engineer in the state irrigation department—married her off young to Durga Prasad, an inspector with the Peerless Insurance Company in Howrah. Widowed in 1988, Renu, who had studied up to intermediate level, returned to her paternal home in Bettiah with her two young children, a boy and a girl.

With support from her well to do family, Renu started as an insurance agent with her late husband’s company. In 1991, around the time L K Advani’s Rath yatra was stopped by the Lalu Prasad government at Samastipur, a young Renu was drawn to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. A year later, she was made the district president of Durga Vahini, the VHP’s women wing, just months before the Babri Masjid was demolished on December 6, 1992.

As a successful Durga Vahini activist, Renu soon joined the BJP. In the 1995 Bihar polls, she was fielded from Nautan. Her political fortunes looked up when BJP shifted her to Bettiah in 2000. The old city area of Bettiah that has had a long history of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS provided her with a core organizational support that helped her politically. And, she had the blessings of the Late Madan Prasad Jaiswal, then Bettiah MP, who Renu affectionately called ‘Chacha’, just as she called-and still calls- everyone ‘Bhaiya’. And Bettiah, in turn, has known Renu as ‘Didi’.

Renu’s entry into the BJP coincided not only with the ascendance of Hindutva, but it also overlapped with the rise of Mandal politics. And in time, social engineering became the mantra of electoral politics. It helped that she was a Nonia- the traditional saltpetre mining caste— an EBC, which further propelled her on the political racecourse.

In 2005, Renu became a minister in the Nitish Kumar government. She retained the Bettiah seat in 2010 but a cabinet berth eluded her. When she lost the 2015 polls, Sushil Kumar Modi, who is among her mentors, asked this reporter in surprise: “How did Renu lose out?” Today, the giant wheel has turned in such a way that Renu has replaced her mentor as the deputy CM, albeit together with Katihar MLA Tarkishore Prasad- also a leader with RSS moorings.

Source: The Times of India

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9WyVeKArco