Three years to the day after what he calls the single largest government appointment event in Indian history, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav has turned the anniversary into a pointed political charge sheet — against Nitish Kumar, against the current NDA government in Bihar, and against what he describes as a deliberate throttling of youth employment the moment the Mahagathbandhan fell.

The day Gandhi Maidan became a job fair for 1.2 lakh people

On 2 November 2023, the Mahagathbandhan government distributed 1,20,336 appointment letters simultaneously at Patna's historic Gandhi Maidan. Tejashwi claims this was the first and only event of its scale in independent India — where permanent government jobs were handed out in a single, mass ceremony. The letters flowed from teacher recruitments conducted through the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) under two tranches labelled TRE-1 and TRE-2, with Tejashwi asserting that more than 3 lakh teachers were absorbed through that process without a single paper leak.

The opening verse Tejashwi quotes — 'मैं गरुड़ कृष्ण मैं पक्षिराज, सिर पर ना चाहिए मुझे ताज!' ('I am Garuda, I am the king of birds — I need no crown upon my head!') — sets the tone: a declaration of purpose over personal glory, with the claim that he voluntarily gave Nitish Kumar the political credit for an achievement he considers his own.

From 'impossible' to 1.2 lakh letters: the timeline Tejashwi is drawing

The RJD leader traces the arc back to the 2020 Bihar assembly elections, when he first announced a plan to create 10 lakh permanent government jobs backed by what he describes as scientific data. He says then-Chief Minister Nitish Kumar publicly mocked the pledge, asking where the salary money would come from. That scepticism, Tejashwi argues, ran wall-to-wall on news channels — and was then proved wrong within months of the Mahagathbandhan taking office in August 2022.

When Nitish Kumar broke with the BJP and approached Rabri Devi's residence at 10 Circular Road to seek RJD's support, Tejashwi says the one non-negotiable condition he placed was delivery on those 10 lakh jobs. The teacher recruitment was, in his framing, only the first instalment. He says a blueprint for over 1.3 lakh recruitments in the public health cadre alone was ready and cleared — until Nitish Kumar personally held back the file.

January 2024: the collapse that froze Bihar's hiring

In January 2024, Nitish Kumar dissolved the Mahagathbandhan and returned to the NDA fold, an alliance shift that Tejashwi calls unprovoked and damaging specifically to young job-seekers. What followed, he says, was not more recruitment but repression: youths who demanded jobs were allegedly met with lathicharge, water cannons in freezing cold, and — in his words — beaten with intent to kill on public roads.

His closing indictment is blunt: since that January, Bihar has not heard the sound of another large-scale government appointment. The 3-year anniversary of the Gandhi Maidan ceremony, he implies, now reads less as a celebration and more as a benchmark of what was possible — and what was deliberately stopped.

For Bihar's roughly 94 million population — a state where youth unemployment and government job aspirations remain among the sharpest political live wires — the question Tejashwi is placing on the table today is a simple one: where did the remaining 8-plus lakh jobs go?