It’s a well-known fact that Sharad Yadav and Nitish Kumar became Union Ministers for the first time in the VP Singh ministry in December 1989.

 But what is not known so much is the fact that Sharad, like Nitish, is also an electrical engineer.

 While Nitish studied at the Bihar College of Engineering (now called National Institute of Technology, Patna), Hoshangabad-born Sharad graduated from the Jabalpur College of Engineering in Madhya Pradesh.

Like Nitish, Sharad too came under the influence of Jaya Prakash Narayan (popularly known as JP) and joined the students’ movement in the mid-70s.

He was arrested during the Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution) movement but it paid him rich electoral dividends when he contested and won the Lok Sabha seat from Jabalpur in 1977.

When he was sworn in as a minister in VP’s Cabinet, he was an MP from Badaun in Uttar Pradesh. A bosom friend of Lalu Prasad, who in March 1990 became the Chief Minister of Bihar, Sharad shifted his political base from UP to Bihar’s Madhepura in 1991, where he defeated the don-turned-politician Anand Mohan (who is at present in jail for killing a DM) by a margin of nearly three lakh votes. This was his first Lok Sabha win in the post-Mandal era.