New Delhi, Aug 20 (PTI) Amid the opposition’s campaign in Bihar led by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, the ruling National Democratic Alliance is set to launch a joint organisational drive from October 23 to boost coordination among its constituents and synergise its push to retain power in the state.
With Bihar going to polls in October-November, the NDA has formed 14 committees and its two principal members, the BJP and the JD(U), will each head seven of them.
Tasked with organising workers’ meetings at different places across the state, the alliance leaders of these groups will oversee programmes in two phases, first from August 23 to August 25, and then from August 28 to August 30.
The members of these committee, sources said, include names from three other NDA parties — Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular), and Rashtriya Lok Morcha.
BJP leaders heading the committees are deputy chief ministers Samrat Chaudhary and Vijay Kumar Sinha, its state president Dilip Kumar Jaiswal, Union ministers Giriraj Singh and Nityanad Rai, state minister Mangal Pandey, and Lok Sabha MP Sanjay Jaiswal.
The seven JD(U) leaders in charge of the committees include the party’s national working president Sanjay Jha, Union minister Ram Nath Thakur, its state president Umesh Singh Kushwaha, and state ministers Vijay Chaudhary, Shrawon Kumar, Ashok Choudhary and Ratnesh Sada.
All the 14 committees, the sources added, will have seven members each, including MPs and state ministers, as the alliance looks to rally workers from its different constituents in its bid to repulse the challenge from the RJD-Congress-Left alliance.
The workers’ meetings will be held at 83 locations to cover the entire stretch of Bihar, which has 243 Assembly seats, through six days.
The joint meetings of the alliance workers come amid the ongoing public campaign by Rahul Gandhi against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state by the Election Commission, with the Congress MP and his Bihar allies accusing the poll watchdog of “vote chori” in collusion with the BJP.
The collective meetings will also help unite workers of different parties for a common purpose and build an overarching narrative, something that was missing to some extent in the 2020 polls when the Lok Janshakti Party headed by Union minister Chirag Paswan walked away and inflicted serious damage on the JD(U)’s prospects.
Paswan’s single-minded attack on the party headed by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had strained its ties with the BJP, leading the JD(U) leader to sever ties with the saffron party in August 2022 before he returned to the NDA in January 2024.
NDA leaders said they will launch a big people outreach programme following these meetings, expressing confidence that the perception created by the opposition that the SIR is aimed at denying voting rights to the electorate will not cut much ice once the electoral rolls are finalised. PTI KR ARI
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