Two days after his surprise visit to the family of a teenage rape victim in UP, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi is set to make a brief, unscheduled visit to Forbesganj in Bihar on Friday to meet the kin of the victims of the brutal June 3 police firing on poor Muslims.
While this visit was highly expected by Bihar’s Congress leaders in the wake of the police firing that killed four people, including a pregnant woman and an infant, many Congressmen were caught unawares when they suddenly learnt of the visit on Thursday afternoon. Even as some of them prepared in the evening to leave Patna for Forbesganj in Araria district, about 350 km away, they had no clear idea about Mr Gandhi’s travel plans and his programmes in the small town in north Bihar.
Araria’s acting district magistrate Shashi Bhushan Kumar told this newspaper that Mr Gandhi was “very much expected ,” but said he did not have “any more details”. Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee senior spokesman Prabhat Kumar Singh, who would accompany BPCC president Chaudhary Mehboob Ali Kaiser during Mr Gandhi’s visit, said: “We are still waiting to get the visit’s details.”
The Nehru-Gandhi family’s scion, visiting Bihar for the first time seven months after the Congress met its most humiliating rout in the state’s Assembly polls, would bring to sharper national spotlight the controversial police firing in Bhajanpur village during a public protest against the blocking of a road due to land acquisition by an upcoming factory owned partly by a Bihar BJP legislator.