Patna: Former state Congress chief Ashok Choudhary is heading towards a resurgence after spending months in the political wilderness and moving to the JDU.

Patna is full of posters of Ashok and chief minister Nitish Kumar ahead of a youth meet in the city on Tuesday. "According to our information Ashok Choudhary is going to be elevated to either a minister or as state chief of the JDU," said a senior JDU leader, pointing out that Nitish's portrait on posters can only be put up with the chief minister's approval.

The need for Ashok to be elevated, according to JDU sources, has become necessary since the "revolt" by former Speaker Uday Narayan Chaudhary and JDU MLA Shyam Rajak started sulking.

These two leaders were the JDU's two Dalit faces before the 2015 Assembly polls. While Uday has since gone public with his criticism against Nitish, Rajak's pin-pointed questions in the Assembly, making a mockery of his own government's claims of good governance, has unnerved the Janata Dal United. The NDA's efforts to keep another Dalit icon in former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi has also fallen on its face since Manjhi joined hands with the RJD.

Dalits constitute around 16 per cent of Bihar's voters. In the pre-1990s days, most of the community sided with the Left parties and the Congress. After 1990 they sided with Lalu, and later distributed loyalties between the CPI(ML) and Ram Vilas Paswan's LJP.

It was Nitish who made the Mahadalit vote bank taking away 21 of the 22 Dalit sections, clubbing them as Mahadalit. It paid him political dividends in 2010 Assembly polls. But now with the Dalit community hit by his government's sand and liquor policy and known Dalit faces deserting the party, it appears to be putting its trust on Ashok Choudhary.

Ashok is a known Dalit face with a political legacy. Young, according to political standards, he is educated and fluent in English. One of the crucial factors in Ashok's favour is his experience in running an organisation.

During the Grand Alliance government, Ashok - then the president of the Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee - was instrumental in selecting Congress candidates and played a role in cementing the mahagathbandhan. Even during the dying days of the alliance government, he tried to broker a peace between Lalu Prasad and Nitish.