The Janata Dal (United) on Saturday came out with a new list of national office bearers, approved by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar who took over as the party president less than a month ago.

Veteran socialist leader Vashishth Narayan Singh, a Rajya Sabha MP and close aide of Kumar, who stepped down as the state unit chief three years ago citing health reasons, has been made the national vice president.

Singh, whose friendship with Kumar dates back to the 1974 students’ movement in Bihar led by Jayaprakash Narayan, replaces Mangani Lal Mandal who in March last year became only the second leader to have been made the JD(U)’s vice president after former poll strategist Prashant Kishor, who was given the post in 2017.

Mandal has been made a national general secretary. The party’s most visible face in the media, K C Tyagi, has been designated as “political advisor and spokesperson”. The other spokesperson in the list is Rajib Ranjan, a former MLA from the Chief Minister’s home district of Nalanda, who returned to JD(U) last year after quitting the BJP, though he has been stripped of the post of national general secretary he had been holding so far.

The number of national general secretaries has been trimmed down to 11, compared with 20 in the previous list that came out in March last year when the party was headed by Rajiv Ranjan Singh ‘Lalan’, who stepped down last month to concentrate on his Lok Sabha seat Munger, amid rumours that he had grown too close to ally RJD.

Lalan, however, continues to enjoy the trust of Nitish Kumar and has accompanied the supreme leader at meetings of the INDIA bloc, besides Sanjay Kumar Jha, who has been retained as a national general secretary. Jha is the only Bihar minister to figure in the list of national general secretaries.