Chief minister Mamata Banerjee will walk in three locations of North Dinajpur district on Tuesday, within 24 hours of Congress MP Rahul Gandhi crossing the same stretch with his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, which entered neighbouring Bihar on Monday.

Mamata’s decision to walk almost on Rahul’s Yatra route comes on a day the Bengal government’s irrigation department refused to grant permission to the Congress to use a bungalow in Harishchandrapur-I block of Malda as a stopover for Rahul during his march.

Mamata, Trinamul leaders said, planned the walks in Chopra, Islampur and Raiganj towns. Rahul started from Chopra and moved through Islampur to enter Kishanganj in Bihar.

He will re-enter Bengal on Wednesday, from where the Yatra will move through Murshidabad and Birbhum the next day to enter Jharkhand. Mamata will also be in both districts on the same dates for government events.

“We are doing our preparations to make these walks (of the chief minister) successful,” said Kanaialal Agarwala, the North Dinajpur district Trinamul president.

Political observers pointed out that ever since the Yatra entered Bengal, Trinamul has, in no uncertain terms, tried to tell the Congress that it lacks a support base here and Rahul should focus on other states.

An observer said that the Trinamul supremo’s decision to walk the same route as Rahul indicated that Bengal’s ruling party wanted to show its might in North Dinajpur, the home turf of late Congress leader Priya Ranjan Das Munshi.

The Congress has kept its Bengal leg of the Yatra low-key and its central leaders sent feelers to Mamata. So far, there is no indication that Trinamul will acquiesce to joining the Yatra.

However, local Congress leaders are aggrieved. Kalisadhan Roy, the Congress working president in Malda, on Monday said the state irrigation department did not permit them to use a government bungalow in Harishchandrapur-I block. “We planned to host a lunch for Rahul Gandhi and others with him at the bungalow. We applied for permission properly. Till date, no permission has been granted,” said Roy.

The party, he said, on Monday changed Rahul’s lunch venue to a club ground in Debipur, Ratua.

A local Congress veteran fumed at the lack of political courtesy. “The bungalow was built during the Congress regime in 1974 when A.B.A. Ghani Khan Choudhury (the Congress patriarch of Malda) was the state irrigation minister. Now, accommodation is being denied to a member of the Gandhi family for a brief event,” he said.

Trinamul leader Sabina Yeasmin, the minister of state, irrigation department, who is from Malda, said: “I do not know about this bungalow issue. Permission is granted by department officials. We have nothing to do with it.”

The officials concerned could not be contacted.

Rahul, who resumed his Yatra from Sonapur in North Dinajpur on Monday morning, halted at a dhaba in Panjipara near the Bengal-Bihar border for tea, and spoke with truck drivers on whether their earnings were enough to run their families. Then, he left for Kishanganj.