Bihar Assembly Elections 2025 | Samrat Choudhary: A political career mired in controversies

Patna: While currently, Samrat Chaudhary is among the tallest BJP leaders of Bihar, being the former state party chief and current deputy Chief Minister, it was another tall state BJP leader and ex-deputy CM, Sushil Kumar Modi, who ensured Samrat’s removal as a minister in 1999 for being "underage".

Modi was then the Leader of the Opposition, representing the saffron party, while Samrat was a minister in the RJD Government led by Rabri Devi. He was neither a member of the state Assembly nor the Legislative Council when he was sworn in as a minister on May 19, 1999 and remained so until his removal.

On November 16, 1999, when Samrat was about to celebrate his 31st birthday, the news poured in that the then Bihar Governor Suraj Bhan had ordered his dismissal, asking CM Rabri Devi to register a forgery case against him. An initially defiant Chaudhary finally had to resign after RJD chief Lalu Prasad asked him to.

Chaudhary's political career has been mired in controversies. He was originally in the RJD but switched over to the JD(U) before again crossing over the fence to the BJP for greener pastures. He has also served as ministers in multiple governments, including under Rabri Devi in 1999, Jitan Ram Manjhi in 2014 and presently as Nitish Kumar's deputy since January 2024.

Chaudhary was born in a political family. While his father, Shakuni Choudhary, a founding member of the Samata party, won seven times as MLA and MP, his mother, Parvati Devi, was an MLA from Tarapur. Samrat himself has won two Assembly elections in 2000 and 2010; he lost twice in 2005 and 2015.

After over two decades and several changes to the Bihar political scene, the age-old problem seems to have returned to haunt Chaudhary. Recently, Jan Suraaj founder Prashant Kishor sought his sacking and arrest in a 1995 murder case. Kishor alleged that while Chaudhary was released from jail after he submitted documents stating that he was a minor in 1995, his 2020 election affidavits revealed that he was 26 at the time of the incident.

Chaudhary has dismissed Kishor's allegations, saying, “The man, who has never contested an election, is making allegations against me, hoping against hope that if he levels charges against Bihar’s Deputy CM, he would get national media attention.”

Chaudhary is presently serving his second stint as MLC in the BJP, which has promoted him as a leader of the Koeri community, the castemen similar to Nitish’s Kurmi. In Bihar, Kurmi and Koeri are treated as Luv-Kush, the mythological twins of Lord Rama and Sita. In the corridors of power, too, Nitish and Samrat strike a similar chord nowadays.