A year before the assembly elections in Bihar, the political temperature has started rising. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is busy in membership campaign and increasing the family of National Democratic Alliance (NDA). At the same time, Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has started preparations for another tour of Tejashwi Yadav from September 10. Before the Lok Sabha elections, Tejashwi had done Jan Vishwas Yatra in which the party was excited due to the crowd gathering but got only four seats. Tejashwi’s statewide tour, starting with the name of Karyakarta Aabhar Yatra, will be in several phases. In the first phase, Tejashwi will stay in Samastipur, Darbhanga, Madhubani and Muzaffarpur for 2 days each and will hold meetings with RJD workers and leaders of 41 assembly constituencies in 8 days.
RJD is cautious and taking cautious steps due to the changed circumstances after Janata Dal United (JDU) president and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar returned to NDA and winning only four seats in the Lok Sabha elections. Lalu Yadav has returned from Singapore after a routine checkup and is holding a meeting of MLAs, MLCs and party leaders before Tejashwi’s visit. The indications are clear that he will keep a close watch on his son’s visit and the party’s campaign from behind the scenes. In view of the possibility of some leaders leaving and joining the party and running away, Tejashwi is meeting leaders up to the Panchayat level and focusing on strengthening the organization.
There was a huge crowd in Tejashwi’s Jan Vishwas Yatra but in the Lok Sabha elections, RJD alone won only 4 seats. That too in Magadh and Shahabad. That is why BJP and JDU are not giving importance to Tejashwi’s Aabhar Yatra. But political pundits believe that Lok Sabha and assembly elections in Bihar are different games. Prashant Kishore, who is forming a party on October 2, has been mainly targeting RJD, Lalu and Tejashwi in the Jan Suraj Yatra for two years.
RJD leaders say that caste census and reservation will be important agendas for Tejashwi and RJD. A leader said that the people of Bihar know who was behind increasing the reservation and who is behind stopping it. The RJD leader said that RJD will expose the hidden agenda of NDA among the people on the issue of caste census and reservation.
Prashant Kishor is a new political player in Bihar but he has worked with all the parties of Bihar in the game of politics. He is talking about new options in Bihar by taking everyone along but time will tell whether election strategists have been making strategies only for big leaders till now or can they make themselves big leaders by making strategies. Prashant Kishor is saying that if Bihar has to be changed, if it has to be taken forward then we will have to stop voting for one out of fear of the other. Tejashwi is his favorite subject and he says that Tejashwi speaking on socialism and development is too much.
JDU does not seem to be very worried about all this. JDU senior minister Vijay Chaudhary says that what Nitish Kumar has done is visible to everyone and cannot be erased from the minds of the people of Bihar. But BJP is aggressive on Tejashwi’s yatra. BJP state president Dilip Jaiswal is saying that Tejashwi Yadav should take out a maafi yatra because after coming to power, his leaders have done corruption and stopped the development of the state. Jaiswal says that people know that RJD cannot grow beyond one family and it wants everything for the family only.
DM Diwakar, former director of AN Sinha Samaj Adhyayan Sansthan, believes that this visit of Tejashwi is happening at the right time, through which he will try to break the equation of NDA on the sensitive issue of caste census and reservation. The national issue that is being created from this is also in the interest of RJD’s ally Congress. Diwakar says- “The assembly elections are still far away but the leaders have started changing parties. This will increase further in the coming days because the ambitions of leaders are increasing in every party. RJD knows that caste census and reservation can change the game but it is a challenge to explain its point to the common people. What Tejashwi has to do is clear to him.”