Prime Minister Narendra Modi will kick off the Bihar poll campaign of his party with Samastipur, the birthplace of Karpoori Thakur, the former Chief Minister of Bihar, on Friday. Thakur was given the Bharat Ratna by the NDA government last year.
PM Modi, who will be joined by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, is expected to address another rally later the same day. He has several stops in the state as part of his campaign: he will visit it on October 30, November 2, and November 3, and then the first stage of polling will be conducted on November 6.
Voters across 121 of Bihar’s 243 Assembly seats will head to the booths in the first round. The second phase, covering 122 seats, is scheduled for November 11, with counting on November 14.
Observers note that the decision to begin in Samastipur is politically deliberate. Karpoori Thakur’s paternal village, Karpoori Gram, lies only a few kilometres from the PM’s rally site.
Jagriti Thakur, the socialist icon’s granddaughter and a dentist by profession, is contesting from the Morwa Assembly seat in Samastipur, representing Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party. She is the daughter of Thakur’s younger son, Dr. Birendra Thakur, while his elder son, Ramnath Thakur, serves as a JD(U) Rajya Sabha MP and Union minister.
BJP state president Dilip Jaiswal confirmed the Prime Minister’s detailed campaign roadmap, per an Indian Express report.
He also noted that Modi would take the poll campaign to Samastipur and Begusarai on Friday and return to Bihar on October 30 to attend the rallies in Muzaffarpur and Chhapra.
Meanwhile, the JD(U) is also preparing a series of 80 public meetings with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Nitish has already launched the campaign trail, starting his party's activities in Samastipur last week and proceeding to Muzaffarpur this week.
