Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar with home minister P Chidambaram at the chief ministers’ conference on internal security in New Delhi on Tuesday. (PTI)

New Delhi, Feb. 1: Nitish Kumar’s maiden post-victory visit to the capital is carefully calibrated to send out a no-nonsense message on Bihar’s development imperatives.

His three-day stay here is packed with top-notch engagements specifically targeted at espousing the cause of “Naya Bihar”.

The first stop of the chief minister’s Bihar agenda tonight was a dinner for all Bihar cadre officers in Delhi where he played the “aa ab laut chalen” theme to urge bureaucrats to home duty. The dinner was organised at Bihar Niwas following Nitish’s daylong engagement with the internal security conference.

Bihar faces a real shortage of competent officers as a number of the state cadre IAS and IPS officers have shifted to Delhi. Some key IAS and IPS had even shifted base to the national capital even during the first five years of Nitish.

“The chief minister will use the dinner to urge the officers to return to Bihar. But for those who cannot, Nitish would tell them to help further the state’s cause through the offices they hold here,” said a close aide of Nitish.

For Nitish, Wednesday holds a packed schedule of appointments starting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and home minister P. Chidambaram. Officials here said that the focus of these meetings was to extract Bihar’s rightful share.

In between, he will meet the reporters to take his message across to the people. A private interaction with senior women journalists at the Indian Women’s Press Club is of particular importance, given his effort to build a constituency among the weaker sex. Nitish had even broken out with his Mandal brethren like senior party leader, JD(U) president Sharad Yadav to support 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament.

Nitish’s political meetings are deliberately kept under wraps to avoid any speculation about his prime ministerial ambitions. Sources, however, said Nitish would certainly meet top BJP leaders and also other party leaders to discuss the political situation ahead of the budget session.

Nitish had kept away from Delhi since the October-November polls he swept in a conscious move to show that he remains focused in his Bihar building exercise and has no ambitions of shifting to Delhi. In political circles, however, he widely figures as a strong contender for the country’s top post in 2014.

Despite his best efforts to ward off any talk on these counts, it is sure to come up during his interaction with reporters. Nitish himself set the ball rolling by attacking the UPA government over “corruption” and “inflation” that led to disarray in the Congress.