Annapurna Devi, who entered politics following her husband's death in 1998, has steadily risen through the ranks and is now the new Minister of Women and Child Development in the Modi 3.0 cabinet.
She replaced Smriti Irani, whose loss from Amethi was one of the most high-profile setbacks for the BJP in this election, marking the end of an era in what had become a BJP stronghold, albeit briefly.
Devi, the BJP's prominent OBC representative in Jharkhand, has been inducted into the Modi 3.0 cabinet as part of the party's strategy to consolidate the sizable OBC vote bank ahead of the crucial state elections later this year.
In the recently concluded elections, Annapurna Devi won from Koderma on a BJP ticket by 791,000 votes, defeating her nearest rival, the CPI-ML's Vinod Kumar Singh, by over 300,000 votes.
She began her political career by contesting and winning the 1998 by-election in Koderma, a seat that fell vacant after her husband's death, representing Lalu Yadav's RJD in undivided Bihar.
She has since won state elections four times—in 2000, 2004, 2005, and 2009—on an RJD ticket and served as a minister in Jharkhand in 2012.
She led the RJD's Jharkhand unit from 2014 to 2019, before defecting to the BJP and contesting the Lok Sabha elections from Koderma.
She gained prominence by defeating Babulal Marandi by a substantial margin.
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