Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar appointed former IAS officer Manish Kumar Verma as the Janata Dal United (JDU) national general secretary on Thursday with eyes on the 2025 Assembly elections and beyond. He had joined the party on Tuesday.

A media communiqué by JDU MLC and secretary general Afaque Ahmad Khan said: “JDU national president Nitish Kumar has appointed Manish Kumar Verma as the national general secretary of the party with immediate effect.”

On the other hand, Manish thanked Nitish for imposing faith in him and asserted that he would work hard for the Assembly elections.

Fifty-year-old Manish hails from Nitish’s native Nalanda district and is considered close to him. Both of them belong to the ‘Kurmi’ caste.

Manish was a 2000 batch IAS officer and came to Bihar on deputation in 2012. He was given plum postings as district magistrate in Patna and Purnia. It was during his tenure that a stampede occurred at Dussehra celebrations in the state capital in 2014 in which at least 42 people were killed and over 100 injured.

He later served as a secretary to the chief minister and took VRS (voluntary retirement from service) in 2021 when his deputation was over and he was called back to
Odisha.

Nitish appointed him a member of the Bihar State Disaster Management Authority and also his additional advisor.

Manish’s appointment as JDU national general secretary gives credence to speculations that Nitish could be grooming him as his successor. He has been entrusted with the responsibility of looking after the party’s organisation and expanding it further. Sources said that he has been working with party workers for the past couple of years.

The caste factor also strengthens the speculations, because apart from Nitish there is no other Kurmi leader at the party’s national level and Manish’s appointment could be a part of his ‘social engineering’ in the light of the forthcoming state polls. He could also use this move in the Jharkhand elections slated to be held later this year.

The chief minister had previously tried a similar move with former bureaucrat RCP Singh, by anointing him as the party’s national president.

He went on to become a Union minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet but was booted out of the JDU after he fell out with Nitish in 2021.

A few party leaders also saw Manish’s appointment as a balancing act of Nitish with regard to Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Kumar Jha being made the JDU executive president.