Massive crowds gathering regularly at LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan’s public meetings in his ongoing tour of Bihar have raised hopes in the dalit stalwart and his nearly decimated party for an upsurge in the coming elections.
While keen to keep his core dalit vote-bank intact in the face of constant appeasement from other parties, Mr Paswan has displayed care to expand the LJP’s appeal into all sections of the electorate. He is therefore promising a wide range of sops to the people in his speeches during his “Bihar Bachao Yatra”, which started on January 5, and hitting out hard at the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government at every public meeting.
Mr Paswan, currently a Rajya Sabha member, has promised to facilitate free education to students from poor families up to graduation level and giving four decimils of land to each landless poor family in Bihar if the LJP forms a government in the state in 2015. Pointing out the gaping loopholes in the implementation of welfare schemes for dalits by the JD(U)-BJP government, Mr Paswan said in Gaya on Thursday that the dalits were still being cheated and the government’s land distribution among them has remained dismal.
Bihar’s rapidly-declining law and order situation and the recent spate of deaths by spurious liquor have figured prominently in Mr Paswan’s speeches.