NEW DELHI: Indian National Congress‘ Central Election Committee (CEC) it set to meet on October 8 (Wednesday) to decide on the candidates for the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections. The meeting, chaired by Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, will be held virtually with various CEC members and senior leaders of the party set to attend. Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi will be joining online too while on a visit to the South American countries. Other members of the CEC, including Sonia Gandhi, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhary, KC Venugopal, Amee Yajnik, Uttam Kumar Reddy, TS Singh Deo and others are set to attend. The Congress is in alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and other left parties including CPI, CPI (ML) in the state. The alliance is set to give a contest to the National Democratic Alliance, consisting of BJP, JD(U), LJP (RV) HAMS, and others. While the party has not announced any seat sharing arrangement with its alliance partners, they have recently concluded its Voter Adhikar Yatra, which covered various districts in the state, led by Rahul Gandhi and RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav.Earlier, former Uttarakhand chief minister and senior Congress leader Harish Rawat said that Bihar is waiting to show the path of change to the entire country in the upcoming assembly polls.The Election Commission has announced the schedule for the Bihar Assembly elections. The 243 Assembly seats will go to the polls in two phases on November 6 and November 11, with counting of votes to be held on November 14.The total number of electors in the final list stands at 7.42 crore, while there were 7.89 crore electors as of June 24 this year. An Election Commission press release stated that 65 lakh voters were removed from the draft list, and the number of electors in the draft list as of August 1, 2025, stood at 7.24 crore.
