IANS

New Delhi, Jun 25: Railway Minister Lalu Prasad's Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) was on Tuesday granted the status of a national political party by the Central Election Commission.

“Since the RJD has got more than six percent votes in four states, namely, Bihar, Jharkhand, Nagaland and Manipur, in the last assembly elections, we had written to the Election Commission of India to grant us the status of a national party. We got the relevant letter Tuesday,” RJD general secretary Ram Deo Bhandari told IANS.

Apart from assembly votes, the RJD also fulfilled the other criterion of having at least four Lok Sabha MPs - it has 24 MPs in the lower house.

The RJD applied to the Election Commission in May but there was a delay in the decision as the poll panel was busy with the Karnataka assembly elections.

The RJD is the seventh political party to get the national status. The others are the Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).