Patna, Nov. 3: Narendra Modi will be in Patna on a day Nitish Kumar is expected to hold the biggest political rally in the seven years that he has been chief minister.

Modi will be in the Bihar capital on Sunday to attend the funeral of veteran BJP leader Kailashpati Mishra who passed away today at the age of 89. Mishra was governor of Gujarat between May 2003 and July 2004.

But it is unlikely that Modi and Nitish would come face to face.

The Gujarat chief minister is expected to fly in to Patna from Gandhinagar on a chartered flight around 3pm, visit Mishra’s home in Kautilya Nagar to pay respects and fly out in the same aircraft at 4pm, sources said.

Nitish, who called on Mishra’s family today, is scheduled to be at Gandhi Maidan from 10am until at least 3pm for the Bihar Adhikar Rally that has morphed into a spectacle seldom seen in Patna since the dip in the political fortunes of Lalu Prasad.

Sunday’s rally, the final stop for Nitish after a series of Adhikar Yatras across the state, is to press for special category status to Bihar. But the chief minister has used the rally to carry out a massive party-building exercise at a time when the Janata Dal (United) and its ally, the BJP, are engaged in a tussle of brinkmanship, the trigger for which is the unstated rivalry between Modi and Nitish for the top political prize after the next general election scheduled for 2014.

This would be Modi’s first visit to Patna since the summer of 2010 when he was snubbed by Nitish.

During the campaign of 2009, a picture of Modi and Nitish holding their hands aloft at an NDA rally in Ludhiana made the Bihar leader see red. The picture became a campaign poster that Nitish felt was an embarrassment.

During the Patna national executive session of the BJP in 2010, Modi had the same photograph published as a full-page backdrop to an advertisement in local dailies hailing flood-relief aid Gujarat had sent to Bihar. Provoked and offended, Nitish summarily scrapped his dinner invitation to the BJP leaders, returned Modi’s cheque and nearly broke the alliance. It survived only because the BJP gave in to Nitish’s terms: Modi will have no role to play in Bihar.

Modi played no part in the 2010 Assembly polls, which was a major triumph for the Nitish-led alliance. But since then, barbs and arrows have flown from either side, leading up to Nitish’s statement a few months ago that he would only accept a secular candidate for Prime Minister.

The Modi-Nitish covert conflict is among the many fault-lines running through the NDA and gets underscored each time the Bihar BJP openly supports the Gujarat chief minister and threatens to go solo in future elections.