Amit Shah-Nitish Kumar To Hold Mega Rally in Delhi

Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Bihar chief Minister Nitish Kumar will hold a joint mega rally in the run-up to the Delhi assembly elections on February 2. The mega rally will be held in the national capital and is aimed at the Purvanchal vote bank in the national capital. The Purvanchal voter base consisting of people from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, is a seen as a tipping factor in 20 of the 70 assembly constituencies.

The mega rally of the Union Home Minister and the Bihar Chief Minister comes days after Amit Shah had asserted that Nitish would be the chief ministerial face in the Bihar elections scheduled to be held later this year. The JD-U has, in recent days, been wracked by fissures following opposition from senior leader and former Rajya Sabha member Pavan Varma and poll strategist Prashant Kishor, to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR).

Pavan Varma bitterly opposed the Act saying that it was discriminatory in nature. The former bureaucrat said that he had written a letter to the Bihar Chief Minister asking him "how the JD(U) has formed an alliance with the BJP for the Delhi elections, given his own views on the BJP, and the massive national outrage against the divisive CAA-NPR-NRC scheme."

Prashant Kishor had also expressed his views opposing CAA on the popular microblogging site, Twitter.

Nitish Kumar however, responded by saying that both Pavan Varma and Prashant Kishor were free to leave the JDU. The proposed mega rally with Amit Shah is being seen as another clear rebuff to both the dissenting major voices in the JD-U.