Today in Politics: With Rahul and Tejashwi set to address a rally together in Bihar, what to watch out for

Last month, they could not come together on the stage of a political event because of the Enforcement Directorate (ED). But on Friday, as the Congress’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra prepares to enter Uttar Pradesh, its last major stop in Bihar will see Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav share the stage at a public rally.

The Congress MP and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader were scheduled to address a rally in Purnea on January 30 but Tejashwi could not make it there because the ED had questioned him for hours the day before. Now, the two leaders will address the rally in the village of Dhanechha in Kaimur district, scheduled to begin around 2.30 pm, and the message they send out will be closely observed.

With this rally, the INDIA alliance of Opposition parties will be looking for some clear political messaging after weeks of bad news. First, the bloc saw the exit of the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) late last month, followed by the Rashtriya Lok Dal a couple of weeks later. Then, the seat-sharing talks with the Aam Aadmi Party came a cropper and now, creating another potential problem area for the Opposition bloc, the National Conference has said that it won’t budge from its position of contesting all three Lok Sabha seats in the Kashmir Valley. Meanwhile, there is no sign of a forward movement on seat-sharing talks in Maharashtra and in West Bengal the Trinamool Congress (TMC) has long opted out of any on-the-ground agreement, leaving the Congress and the Left to figure out their tie-up.

Along with their line of attack against the BJP and the NDA, it has to be seen if Rahul and Tejashwi provide clarity on the status of seat sharing in Bihar — the two parties have been allies since 2014 — inject a sense of optimism in