Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav started his Bihar tour christened as “Karyakarta Aabhaar” (thanksgiving to party workers) Yatra from Samastipur on Tuesday, indicating that his eyes were set on the 2025 Assembly poll.

He would take the work done by the previous Mahagathbandhan government to the people to seek their support.

“We will go to the people with the work that we did in the 17 months of the Mahagathbandhan government. We gave five lakh government jobs, increased the honorarium of workers in various fields, conducted the caste-based survey, increased reservation to 65 per cent while keeping the 10 per cent quota for the economically weaker sections (EWS) intact,” Tejashwi said.

“Our party will give voice to the issues of the people and I think that they will elect us more robustly this time. We had almost formed the government in 2020 had there been no cheating on eight to 10 seats due to which we fell short. There was a difference of just about 12,000 votes,” he added.

Talking about the reservation increase laws, which were set aside by the Patna High Court in June this year, Tejashwi said that the RJD had been demanding that they be placed in the ninth schedule of the Constitution (to make them immune from judicial scrutiny), “but it was not done and our fears came true.”

Tejashwi, who is the leader of Opposition in the Bihar Legislative Assembly and is the youngest son of RJD president Lalu Prasad, played down the poor performance of the party in the Lok Sabha election earlier this year. “There is a difference between Lok Sabha and state election. The Assembly poll is contested on local issues,” he said.

The first phase of the tour will continue till September 17 in which apart from Samastipur, he will also visit Darbhanga, Madhubani, and Muzaffarpur to interact with party workers from 41 Assembly constituencies in these districts.

“We are starting this dialogue with party workers from Samastipur because it is the birthplace of our leader Karpoori Thakur, whose thoughts and ideals we follow. We are here to discuss various issues with them. We want to meet them and find out the ground reality in a better manner. No one else knows the problems of the people better than our grassroots workers,” Tejashwi said.

The RJD leader pointed out that Bihar’s main issues were unemployment, poverty,
low per capita income, farmers having the lowest income in the country, and 94 lakh Below Poverty Line (BPL) families.

“We are the people of new thoughts and we will make a new Bihar. We need the support and trust of our workers in this endeavour. Migration is a huge issue of the state and a crore people have migrated. This data is with the Union government. So we have to discuss what we can do for these issues,” he said.