The Communist Party of India (CPI) on Wednesday alleged a conspiracy to kill former JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar and to disturb the party’s Opposition unity rally scheduled for Thursday.

“We are saying with full responsibility that the BJP and other fascist forces are conspiring to murder Kanhaiya,” CPI state secretary Satya Narayan Singh said. “The attack on him and his supporters at Bhagwanpur in Begusarai was pre-planned, at the behest of a BJP MLC.” Singh said the reason the BJP is unnerved by Kanhaiya’s rising popularity among the masses.

The Patna district administration did not allow the former students’ union leader to conduct a road show from Mokama to Naubatpur from October 22 to 24.

The CPI state secretary also said the district administration was not cooperating with the party and was evicting men and women who have come from far-flung districts to attend the rally on the pretext of “sanitising the ground from security point of view”.

“These poor people had no place to stay so they came directly to Gandhi Maidan — the rally venue — but were thrown out. We’ve booked the venue for two days, October 24 and 25, so the administration should have completed sanitisation beforehand,” he said.

Thousands of CPI supporters, who had been arriving since Tuesday evening, had to spend hours on the road after eviction. The rally ground was handed back around noon.

Singh said the district administration tried to provide a part of Gandhi Maidan for parking to a function being

organised by the BJP at Sri Krishna Memorial Hall.

“We objected and told officials we are organising a ‘BJP harao, desh bachao’ rally, while the parked vehicles will be of the BJP, making a clash unavoidable. Thankfully, they understood and dropped it,” Singh said.

Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, RJD leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, CPI general secretary S. Sudhakar Reddy, CPM leader Md Saleem, CPI-ML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, Loktantrik Janata Dal leader Sharad Yadav, Dalit leader Jignesh Mewani, HAMS leader Jitan Ram Manjhi, Bihar Congress chief Madan Mohan Jha and its campaign committee chairman Akhilesh Prasad Singh, SP’s Bihar chief Devendra Prasad Singh will attend the event.