(From left) Nand Kishore Yadav, Sushil Kumar Modi and other BJP leaders oversee the rally preparations at Sanjay Gandhi Stadium in Patna on Saturday. Picture by Nagendra Kumar Singh

Patna, June 22: The Bihar BJP will take its first step towards fighting the next Lok Sabha elections on its own tomorrow with a workers’ rally scheduled to be addressed by party president Rajnath Singh.

“Party workers will be allotted the booths they have to manage for the elections,” said state unit vice-president Sanjay Mayuk.

Banners and posters have been plastered across the city for the first visit of Rajnath after the break-up of the 17-year-old alliance with the JD(U). The rally will be held at the Sanjay Gandhi Stadium at Gardanibagh.

“You can be sure that the meet will see a lot of Nitish-bashing. After all, this is the opportunity to train our workers in what they have to say about our former ally at the grassroots,” said a senior BJP leader.

Former BJP president Nitin Gadkari has already given a sense of the mood within the party by his attack on Nitish, accusing the Bihar chief minister of “indulging in votebank”politics.

The BJP is also expected to lay down its broad strategy for the 2014 elections. Prior to the split with the JD(U), the Bihar BJP had conveyed to the central bosses that the longer the alliance stayed, the “greater” the “damage” to the party.

The Bihar BJP believes that the core upper caste voters of the party are angry with Nitish for his constant barbs at Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

The state leaders also claimed that Bihar and Odisha, where the BJP has been decimated following its parting of ways with Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD), were “incomparable”.

The BJP was routed in Odisha after Naveen walked out on it before the 2009 elections. But Bihar leaders say such a scenario is unlikely in the state. “Unlike Odisha, we have a robust organisation and a disciplined cadre everywhere. Our apparatus has helped the JD(U),” a source claimed.

The BJP also maintains that while it managed to transfer its votes to the JD(U), the opposite seldom took place. Its optimism is bolstered by the belief that if Narendra Modi’s backward caste antecedent is propagated and the message of him hailing from the extremely backward caste of oil-pressers percolated down, the BJP could add “substantially” to its primary votes.

The BJP, confident of retaining its hold in the state, is gearing up to take on a more aggressive stand against its former ally.

The split has already caused the one-time friends to fight bitterly. A poster depicting Nitish wearing a “Multani cap” — taken from his visit to Pakistan — is being raked up by the BJP as an example of the chief minister’s “votebank politics”.

“Nitish Kumar is using this photograph to woo a section of the society,” alleged former minister Giriraj Singh.

JD(U) spokesperson Neeraj Kumar alleged that the BJP was indulging in “character assassination” by making unfounded remarks.

Tomorrow’s rally is expected to raise the pitch of the BJP’s attack against Nitish.