Lucknow: Over three months after he quit Nitish Kumar-led JD(U) to join the Rashtriya Lok Dal, KC Tyagi was on Tuesday appointed as the chairman of the party’s parliamentary board, the apex internal decision-making body handling day-to-day administrative, legislative and electoral strategies.RLD president Jayant Chaudhary and 14 other party functionaries have been appointed as the members of the board. They are Major General Bishamber Dayal, former MPs Tarif Singh, Munshi Ram and Malook Nagar; former UP minister Ashok Yadav; RLD MP Rajkumar Sangwan, MLA Rajpal Baliyan, former Rajasthan MLA Abdur Sagir Khan, UP MLC Yogesh Chaudhary and RLD MLA from Bharatpur (Rajasthan) Subhash Garg.Among other members included in the board are RLD national general secretary Yashpal Baghel, former national general secretary Anil Dubey, RLD former Mahila wing president Rama Nagar and RLD’s Baraut Nagar Palika Parishad chairperson Babita Tomar.The party has also included four party functionaries as special invitees. They are farmer leader Yudhveer Singh, Rajasthan-based RLD functionary Vijay Poonia and west UP-based regional party functionaries like Sukhbir Gathina and Chandrabali Yadav.The announcement signalled a major strategic overhaul even as the RLD, an ally of the BJP, gears up for UP assembly elections. Sources said Tyagi’s appointment signals Jayant’s intent of having experienced political managers around him rather than relying solely on traditional RLD faces.Tyagi, a former close aide of Nitish Kumar and a founding member of JD(U), is said to be a master strategist with decades of experience in socialist politics. He represented Janata Dal from Hapur between 1989 and 1991.Tyagi, sources said, also possesses extensive relationships across the political spectrum — from NDA leaders to opposition parties — which could help RLD negotiate alliance issues and policy positions.At the same time, the party has executed a social engineering exercise, purposefully balancing different caste and religious equations (Jat, Gurjar, Rajpur, Muslim and OBC) to shed its single-community image to build a strong social coalition.
