NDA’S Harivansh: A journalist who took up social cause
NEW DELHI: Janata Dal (United) leader Harivansh wore many hats – editor, author, bank official, public servant – before making his debut as Rajya Sabha MP in April 2014. But he wasn’t new to Delhi’s corridors of power.
A former editor of Hindi daily Prabhat Khabar, Harivansh served as the additional information advisor to socialist veteran Chandra Shekhar, who was India’s prime minister between November 1990 and June 1991.
Born to a modest family in socialist icon Jai Prakash Narayan’s Sitabdiyara village in Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia, Harivansh earned the reputation of an author-journalist who espoused the cause of social justice.
Harivansh got his first job with Dharmayug magazine in Mumbai in 1977 and developed a strong bonding with other socialist leaders. Harivansh took banking services exam and became an Official Language Officer with the Bank of India in Hyderabad and later in Patna between 1981-1984.
He was associated with the Reserve Bank of India, but resigned and returned as assistant editor of Hindi weekly Ravivar – launched by the Ananda Bazar Patrika Group – and stayed in Kolkata for the next couple of years.
Gyan Ranjan, a Congress veteran from Jharkhand, had just sold Prabhat Khabar to an industrial house, having base in Kolkata and Ranchi, and Harivansh was offered the editor’s job of the paper published from Ranchi. NEWDELHI:FORMER Congress general secretary BK Hariprasad is the Opposition’s candidate for the Rajya Sabha deputy chairperson’s post, elections to which will be held on Thursday.
The 64-year-old from Bengaluru has risen through the ranks to become a senior leader of the party which he joined in 1972.
Belonging to the backward Idiga community, Hariprasad was general secretary of the Congress for 12 years from 2006 and was removed from the post by Congress president Rahul Gandhi in March. Hariprasad had himself offered to resign after the party’s drubbing in the panchayat elections in Odisha last year.
A three-time Rajya Sabha MP, Hariprasad represents Karnataka, and was first elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1990, then in 2004 and again in 2014.