RJD, Cong will campaign separately for Bihar polls: Lalu

“Nitish Kumar is only a mask and just behind the mask is “Jungle Raj”.

Claiming that Kumar was the first leader to describe the RJD-led government of 15 years as “jungle raj”, Shah in a no- holds-barred attack against the senior JD(U) leader said he had no qualms in going back to Lalu Prasad to hang on to the chief minister’s post.

“By saying that Hindus also eat beef, Lalu Yadav has insulted Yaduvansh”. Heading into the election, the BJP is touting Bihar’s progress during the eight years it was part of the ruling alliance while claiming that those gains were squandered when Kumar chose to dissolve the BJP-JD(U) coalition in 2013, placing politics above his state’s own interests.

This built the crucial enabling environment in favor of BJP – targeting those 21% of voters who develop sympathies for a particular political party as per the EC survey.

In complete contrast is the BJP campaign in Bihar which is precise, creative and of breathtaking scale.

“BJP in panic-without neta, niti and niyat in Bihar and facing defeat they’re brazenly attempting to communalise and mask it with Modi’s rhetorics”, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar said in a tweet on Tuesday. A difference of 4 percentage points between NDA and grand-alliance shows that the Modi-wave is working positively in poll-bound Bihar. Cases have been lodged against the RJD chief in Patna and Muzaffarpur districts too. Because India’s states conduct most day-to-day governance tasks and the public sector remains deeply enmeshed in the functioning of the economy, wrestling control of the state provides the victor with significant political power. It started off in Karnataka, with the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, polling close to 30 percent votes. In 2014, BJP had a strike rate of 70.1 per cent in constituencies it won in 2010, but this was not significantly higher than its overall strike rate of 66.5 per cent. In short, constituencies won by RJD and BJP in 2010 did not carry a discernible caste advantage for re-election. “If Bihar wants to become self-dependent then it is necessary to stop cow slaughter. Is this the fodder scam money?” he asked.

BJP general secretary Bhupender Yadav declared that Lalu was blabbering about beef because he had nothing to say about development. To them, Lalu is still a symbol of all the evils and the development record of Nitish has been made possible due to his alliance with the BJP. “And there is no place for you (Nitish) in any respect”, he stated. “But that Bihari will be from BJP”, he said.

The strategy is clear – SP and RJD to bring back focus on caste and religious minority, Nitish Kumar to focus on development (which retains his pro-development only image of BJP-JDU days) and Congress be a silent contestant in the fray.