The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) president, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and his son Tejashwi Yadav have handed the ticket for the Raghunathpur assembly seat to Osama Shahab, who is the son of Mohammad Shahabuddin, a four-time MP from Siwan.
What’s really catching everyone’s attention is how this happened. The current RJD MLA from Raghunathpur, Harishankar Yadav, announced that he wouldn’t be fighting the election this time. Instead, he has vacated his own seat to fully support Osama. Harishankar, who has always been close to Shahabuddin’s family, said he was doing this out of respect and loyalty, remembering how Shahabuddin helped him in his own political journey. This is a significant gesture, especially since Harishankar was the first person to win this seat for the RJD in 2015, and he won it again in 2020.
As of now, the opposition’s grand alliance still hasn’t figured out its seat-sharing plan. There’s been no formal announcement because the partners, including Congress, RJD, VIP, and CPI-ML, are having serious disagreements. They are reportedly at odds over who should get to contest from certain key seats and how many seats each party should get in total.
Tejashwi’s party RJD, along with CPI-ML and CPI, has also released list of candidates on those seats where other parties do not have claims. Many nominations have also been filed among those candidates, including Tejashwi Yadav himself.
This move brings the focus back on Shahabuddin’s family legacy. Mohammad Shahabuddin was a powerful politician with a Robinhood image, but also faced many criminal cases and died in jail. In 1996, Shahabuddin first became a Lok Sabha MP from Siwan after being a two-time MLA from Jiradei.
After being convicted, Shahabuddin entered his wife, Hina Shahab, into politics, and she fought with RJD in 2009 but she could not win. After this, RJD also fielded Hina in 2014 and 2019, but she continued to lose.
In 2024, when Lalu contested the sitting MLA Awadh Bihari Chaudhary, who had won six times from Siwan seat, Hina fought as an independent. Hina lost that election to JDU Vijayalakshmi Kushwaha by a margin of 93,000 votes, while the RJD’s official candidate came in third with 1.98 lakh votes. Harishankar Yadav, who is known for his close ties to Shahabuddin and has continued to support his family loyally.
