Amit Shah in action as BJP shifts focus on Bihar elections

PATNA: After having won Jharkhand, the BJP is now aggressively pushing itself in Bihar, where it would go to any length possible to capture power in the state.
With the state assembly elections slotted for October this year, a win in Bihar will help extend BJP’s political domination in the Hindi heartland besides settling old score with Nitish Kumar who had split with the BJP over Narendra Modi’s candidature.

“Our president Amit Shah is proactively engaged with Bihar. He recently called a meeting of the party’s core group from the state and will be visiting Patna on 23 January,” the former deputy chief minister and BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi told ET. He said Shah will also address a rally at the historic Gand hi Maidan in Patna on 14 April.

The party has set for itself a target of 185 seats in the 243-member Bihar assembly, scaling up the initial target from 175 seats. Besides, the party will enrol 75 lakh new members, a target set by Shah to accomplish the Bihar mission.

While the BJP has made its intention clear that it would like to build a collation of extremely backward castes (EBCs) and the upper castes, besides augmenting its outreach among the numerically preponderant Yadavas, it is also hoping that chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi will eventually create complications for Kumar, thus leveraging the political advantage to the saffron party in a big way.

As for the moment, the BJP is going big with the birth anniversary celebrations of the former chief minister Late Karpoori Thakur, the most venerated leader of the EBC, which account for nearly 30 per cent of the electorate.

“From 10 January, BJP has been observing birth anniversary celebrations of Karpooriji at the district level. It will be on till 21 January, culminating in a mega celebration function on 23 January in Patna, which will be attended by Shah,” Modi said.

To be true though, the EBCs were known as silent voters of Kumar but the BJP had made inroads into the EBC vote bank in the Lok Sabha elections largely because of Narendra Modi’s projection as someone who belonged to this community.

“Nitishji’s flirtations with the RJD chief and their merger have already offended the EBC, who will never support this combination. The EBCs suffered a lot during the RJD’s regime,” Sushil Kumar Modi said.