Former Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra succumbed to a prolonged illness on Monday at the age of 82. Bihar has declared a three-day state mourning and the JDU leader will be creamted with full state honours. Mishra became the Bihar chief minister for the first time in 1975. He remained in the post till April 1977. He ruled the state again in from 1980 to 1983. His third stint as chief minister in 1989 was a short one and lasted only three months.
Mishra was also given a post in the Union cabinet in 1990. Before joining politics, he served as an economics professor at the Bihar University. During his teaching stint, he submitted nearly 40 research papers. He ventured into politics after his brother Lalit Narayan Mishra, who had served as the Railway minister, was assassinated.
While he was with Congress, Mishra is credited with taking the grand old party to new heights in the state. Before the emergence of Lalu Prasad Yadav in 1990, Mishra was regarded as the biggest mass leader in Bihar. Mishra was known to maintain good relations with everybody in the party – from senior leaders to panchayat workers.
He gained popularity among the Muslims after he made Urdu the second official language of the state during his second tenure as chief minister. He was popularly referred to as ‘Maulana’. After leaving the Congress, Mishra joined the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and then moved on to Janata Dal United (JDU).
Mishra was also convicted in the Rs 950-crore fodder scam by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in September 2013. A special CBI court sentenced Mishra to four years imprisonment. He was granted bail in July 2018 by the Jharkhand High Court. Mishra claimed that he was not involved in the scam and his name was deliberately included in the investigation by then Congress president Sitaram Kesri.