Kanhaiya Kumar, who rose to prominence as a firebrand student union leader, is likely to join the Indian National Congress. The former National Executive Council member of the Communist Party of India unsuccessfully contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Bihar’s Begusarai constituency against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Union Minister Giriraj Singh. For his poll campaign, he raised through crowd-funding INR 70 lakh, the highest permissible election expenditure mandated by the Election Commission of India. Considered to be among the young faces of the Indian Left, Kumar has been a vocal critic of the BJP and Narendra Modi-led government, often sharing the stage at political rallies with other young leaders like Jignesh Mevani and Hardik Patel. 

Born in 1987 in Bihar’s Begusarai, Kanhaiya has served as the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union and National leader of the All India Students Federation (AISF). Kanhaiya forayed into student politics while studying at the College of Commerce in Patna, where he finished a bachelor’s degree in Geography. After completing his post graduation in sociology from Nalanda Open University in Patna, he moved to Delhi to pursue a PhD in African studies at the School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He completed his PhD in February 2019.

A year after being elected the president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU), Kumar landed in a huge controversy in 2016 over slogans raised at an event on the university campus. He was named in a first information report (FIR) and subsequently arrested on charges of sedition. However, a magisterial inquiry later gave him a clean chit, saying there was no evidence of him participating in the so-called ‘anti-national’ sloganeering that night.

Kumar’s autobiography, Bihar to Tihar: My Political Journey, was published in October 2016. He has listed Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh and leaders such as B R ‘Babasaheb’ Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi among his inspirations.

In 2018, Kumar was elected to the party national council of the Communist Party of India, before being inducted into the CPI national executive council in 2019.