NDA alliance hope to cash in on Modi factor in Bihar

Due to absence of any towering state leader and infighting over CM’s post within NDA in Bihar, the BJP it appears has been forced to seek votes in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the upcoming polls, even as it insisted that its collective leadership will take on Nitish Kumar. The BJP it seems has also been taken aback by the high pitched personality centric campaign launched 

by Nitish Kumar.

Big hoardings have been put by the BJP across the state Capital on the eve of his visit to Patna with ‘only Modi’ pictures, which is similar to the ones put up by the Janata alliance which has ‘only Nitish’ pictures. In the big BJP hoardings, NDA leaders like Ram Vilas Paswan, Upendra Kushwaha and Jitan Ram Manjhi are conspicuous by their absence, while in the Janata alliance hoardings, there is no trace of even Laloo Prasad Yadav, who despite reverses is still considered the most powerful mass base state leader in Bihar. 

Incidentally the two leaders who be sharing dais in Patna at the function to formal launch of Indian Institute of Technology, thereafter the Prime Minister would head to Muzzafarpur to address a public rally to launch BJP’s campaign. When the question was posed to the Bihar BJP chief spokesperson Vinod Narayan Jha on the party fighting the upcoming polls in the name of Modi as appeared from the big hoardings across the city and the Patna Railway station, he told Millennium Post: “We will fight the Bihar polls under collective NDA leadership. Modi ji is our most important leader, as such there might be such hoardings.”

“You can see our Raths (campaign vehicles), it has pictures of all the NDA leaders like Jitan Manjhi, Ram Vilas Paswan, Nand Kishore Yadav and others,” he said.

It appears that BJP has been forced to tweak its Bihar poll strategy, apparently due to high pitched 

<g data-gr-id="59">campaign</g> launched by Janata-Congress alliance which is only projecting Nitish Kumar and seeking another term for him. 

The interesting part of the Nitish campaign is that it does not even mention the Bihar CM as a JD(U) leader, which is very similar to the one launched by the BJP during the Lok Sabha, where there was no mention of BJP and its lotus symbol in some of the big hoardings of Narendra Modi, who was the party’s prime ministerial candidate. Prashant Kishore, who designed the successful Modi Lok Sabha campaign, is now working for Nitish Kumar. On the other hand, the BJP it seems has learnt from it’s Delhi experience where in the last minute Kiran Bedi was brought in to be a saving grace for Modi, when it realized that AAP forging ahead by projecting Arvind Kejriwal in an effective manner. By subtly projecting Modi in the Bihar polls, the NDA wants to seek votes in his name.