Terms of Trade: Can Prashant Kishor make an I(m)PAC(t) in Bihar?

While Kishor’s political rhetoric lacks nuance, it has more than compensated for with a sort of blunt aggression and truth-telling which has been lacking in the state’s politics.

Bihar elections will be announced anytime now. Our data journalism team in the HT newsroom will be doing a host of stories on the state’s politics, economy and society in the run up to the polls. However, there is one question about the forthcoming Bihar elections which cannot be answered on the basis of data. It is a question which everyone seems to be asking: How will Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party fare in the elections?

Jan Suraaj founder and political strategist Prashant Kishor addresses a press conference in Patna. (ANI)

The fact that Kishor has been grabbing a lot of eyeballs with his appearances and statements – a lot of which have been targeted at the BJP and JD(U) leadership in the state – in the media has only increased the curiosity about his political prospects in Bihar. This edition of the column will try to lay out arguments which can help, not predict but understand Prashant Kishor’s and his party’s political prospects in the state.

First and most compulsive is the burden of history against any political start-up not just in Bihar but also the country at large. The only time a political party founded from scratch has managed to win power in its first election in India is when NT Rama Rao led the Telugu Desam party (TDP) to a landslide victory in the 1983 election in Andhra Pradesh. To be sure, even the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) won in its first contest in the 1985 elections in Assam, but it did have a past in the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU)-led agitation in the state. Also, unlike the disruptive events which preceded the rise of NT Rama Rao (1977 cyclone in the state) or the AGP (Assam agitation) nothing similar seems to have happened in Bihar in the recent past. Given this background, if Jan Suraaj Party were to indeed capture power in Bihar it would be a historical outlier in Indian politics.

Then there is the political history of Bihar itself. Lalu Prasad Yadav’s 1990-95 term was only the second full term for a chief minister in the state’s history after Bihar’s first chief minister Shri Krishna Prasad Singh. Since then, Lalu (or his wife Rabri Devi) and Nitish Kumar (except when he relinquished the post voluntarily to Jitan Ram Manjhi in 2014 and then took it back) have completed full terms as chief ministers in every election except the one in 2005 February which did not elect a clear winner. Bihar’s politics has become much more stable in the last three and a half decades than it was in the period before that. While both major alliances are trying their best to retain their entrenched presence in the state, Prashant Kishor is hoping to eat into both of their support bases.

What makes Kishor’s challenge in achieving this task even more difficult is his caste identity (Brahmin) in a state where politics has been dominated by leaders from Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Kishor’s own caste is less than 5% of Bihar’s population. It is for this reason that Kishor has pitched his political rhetoric at a more meta level. He is promising a new deal of sorts for Bihar which, he claims, has been suffering continuously in the post-Mandal politics era. To be sure, Bihar’s economic decline or rather stillborn economic status predates the Mandal era and was only accelerated from the Lalu period. While the growth rate did pick up under Nitish, Bihar’s relative economic deprivation has only increased recently. However, pre-Mandal story neither makes for an attractive narrative nor will it find resonance as only a small part of the electorate in the state now has lived memories that far back in time.

While Kishor’s political rhetoric lacks nuance, it has more than compensated for with a sort of blunt aggression and truth-telling which has been lacking in the state’s politics. He is not promising any of the vanilla welfare benefits to the electorate. He is also not selling the politics of pitting one part of the state’s population against another. At the core of his political appeal is a narrative which is saying that Bihar needs a structural transformation rather than one more round of social engineering which has only made the state poorer and its politicians richer. What has added credibility to this holier than thou rhetoric from Jan Suraj Party is the fact that it has actually been working sincerely and continuously on the ground in the last couple of years.

It is this mix of aggressive polemics and a sincere adherence to basic shoe-leather politics that has made people take notice of Kishor and his party in the forthcoming elections. Irrespective of what the results are, this kind of politics is pushing against the political cynicism states like Bihar have become used to. This is not a small achievement by any means for a party fighting its first ever assembly election.

These first principles aside, what can one say about the actual electoral prospects of Jan Suraj Party in the 2025 elections? The only election Kishor’s party has contested in Bihar are four assembly bypolls which were held in November 2024. Its vote share ranged from 3.5% in Ramgarh assembly constituency (AC) to 22.6% in Imamganj. In three of these ACs except Ramgarh, Jan Suraj finished third and in Imamganj, it polled just four percentage points less in vote share than the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). Even if Kishor’s party were to replicate its 2024 by-poll result of finishing third on 75% of the ACs in Bihar, it could cause a huge political disruption in the state. Bahujan Samaj Party founder Kanshiram’s famous dictum about political parties contesting their first election to lose, second one to make someone else lose and third one to win is always a good template to underline the importance of perseverance for new political parties.

To be sure, there is also a more pragmatic, or perhaps a circumspect way to judge what Prashant Kishor or Jan Suraaj will do in the next elections. It is to look at the caste composition of his party’s candidates and their strategic positioning vis-à-vis the two major alliances in the state. If Jan Suraaj does put up candidates from caste backgrounds which are more likely to eat into the votes of the RJD led alliance than the NDA (as was the case in Belaganj and Imamganj bypolls), then accusations that there is some sort of a tacit understanding between Prashant Kishor and the national leadership of the BJP will gain traction.

However, the problem or beauty of politics is that once it crosses a critical threshold it can often acquire a momentum of its own and ceases to be the proverbial leashed dog. The BJP learned it the hard way when the NDA almost lost power in Bihar thanks to the damage the LJP unleashed on the JD(U) in the 2020 elections. A similar argument can be made vis-à-vis conspiracy theorists which claim that the entire India Against Corruption movement, which led to the birth of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), was an RSS prop to undercut the Congress. The AAP gave sleepless nights to the BJP in Delhi and continues to hold power in Punjab, clearly not something the BJP would have desired.

In lieu of a conclusion, let me end with the following. It will be a black swan event if Prashant Kishor and his party were to form a government in Bihar. There can be no statistical explanation for such an eventuality. What is more likely, although far from certain, is the possibility that the Jan Suraaj emerges as a discernible, even if by a distance, third force in the forthcoming polls. If this were to happen what would matter more is Prashant Kishor’s activities after the elections rather than before the elections. Politics is more often than not, the proverbial race between the tortoise and the rabbit than the magician pulling out a rabbit of the hat. Prashant Kishor’s current persona has been mostly built around the later analogy where he has been seen as someone having the Midas touch when it comes to helping parties win elections. He must keep a steady pace like the tortoise to overtake the more favourite but perhaps complacent or compromised rabbit like competitors in his home state’s politics to become a successful politician. If he manages to do this, we will keep hearing and talking about Prashant Kishor even after the Bihar results are declared and it might prove to be a good thing for the home state of both Kishor(e)s who are writing this column and the subject of it.