Nitish, Mamata on target as Amit Shah moves on to Bihar, Bengal

NEW DELHI: A buoyant BJP has now identified Bihar and West Bengal as the next frontier as it seeks to spread the saffron sphere of influence to the east.
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Sources said that wresting Bihar from Nitish Kumar and emerging as the chief opponent of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal figures high on the priority list of party chief Amit Shah.
Although Jharkhand goes to elections earlier, that is before the year ends, Shah does not consider it to be a major challenge because of the unpopularity of the JMM-Congress coalition.The targets for Jammu & Kashmir, another state where elections are due this year, are limited to boosting the party's strength in the state assembly.
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Bihar with its complex caste chemistry offers a bigger challenge, also because the success of BJP in the LS elections forced Nitish Kumar to enter into an awkward alliance with his arch rival Lalu Prasad. However, Shah considers the secular combination to be vulnerable and hopes to overwhelm it by engineering a rainbow coalition of upper castes, most backward castes, sections of dalits and OBCs other than Yadavs and Kurmis.

PM Narendra Modi with BJP chief Amit Shah
The fact that Nitish Kumar prevailed over the old BJP leadership to stop Narendra Modi from campaigning in Bihar before he walked out of NDA to protest against the former Gujarat CM's projection as PM candidate still rankles the party. It feels that JD-U's growing incumbency burden has rendered it a ripe target for an efficient assault of the kind the party mounted in Maharashtra and Haryana.
In Bengal, which has been virtually a 'no-go zone' for the party, BJP senses an opening in the growing resentment against Trinamool Congress's alleged politics of appeasement of the Muslim vote-bank. The increase in its vote share in LS polls and success in the recent assembly by-polls have emboldened the party which wants to overtake Left as TMC's principal challenger.

CPM's stand last week, when it for the first time distinguished Hindu refugees from Bangladesh from Muslim migrants from that country on the ground that the former were victims of religious persecution, can reinforce the party's belief that it can set the agenda in the state.