Oppn’s Bihar yatra ends today with Patna march

While the concluding event was originally planned as a mega rally and a public meeting at Gandhi Maidan with the presence of all top INDIA bloc leaders, later it was changed to a road march. According to people familiar with the matter, this was done after suggestions to this effect by RJD and CPI-ML, the two allies with organisational bandwidth in the state.

A section of Congress has been seeking to project the alliance’s yatra as “Rahul’s yatra”, besides sidestepping declaring Tejashwi Yadav as the Opposition’s chief ministerial face, something that Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav later did to the cheers of the RJD leader.

Organisers said besides top leaders of RJD, Congress and three Left parties, organisational chiefs of other INDIA bloc allies will send representatives, such as Supriya Sule or Jitendra Awhad of NCP-SP, Sanjay Raut of SS-UBT, Yusaf Pathan of Trinamool Congress and nominees of SP and DMK to join the march and concluding event at Ambedkar Park. So far, only two top organisational leaders of INDIA bloc allies from outside Bihar – MK Stalin of DMK and Akhilesh Yadav of SP – have participated in the yatra.

The yatra, started on August 17 from Sasaram, was aimed at rallying the people against the Election Commission’s special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and “vote theft” issues.

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“Spanning 25 districts, visiting more than 110 assembly constituencies and covering over 1,300 km, this yatra has been a milestone in Bihar’s rich history of people’s movements,” said KC Venugopal, AICC general secretary (organisation).Even as the Opposition is seeking to dislodge the nearly two-decade-old reign of Nitish Kumar-led JDU-BJP, analysts said it would be crucial to see whether the SIR issue resonates with voters’ concerns and whether the yatra helps the Opposition alliance expand its appeal beyond its core support base among Muslims and Yadavs.

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