Political analyst-turned-politician Prashant Kishor may test the electoral waters in Bihar sooner than expected, with the bypolls to four Assembly seats in the state that are due being seen by him as a good testing ground for his outfit Jan Suraaj’s popularity.
Kishor, who had earlier announced that he would launch Jan Suraaj as a party on October 2, has been travelling across Bihar for the past two years in the build-up to it. He started the padyatra on Gandhi Jayanti in 2022, and claims to have covered over 5,500 km across the state, touching at least 18 of Bihar’s 38 districts, on foot. Other districts have been covered by vehicles.
Bypolls are due in Ramgarh, Tarari, Imamganj and Belaganj Assembly seats, as their sitting MLAs got elected as MPs in the recent Lok Sabha polls. Three of these four seats had been won by Mahagathbandan allies RJD (Ramgarh, Belaganj) and CPI(M-L) (Tarari) in 2020, while the remaining (Imamganj) had been secured by Hindustan Awami Morcha (Secular) founder and NDA ally Jitan Ram Manjhi.
Kishor has said in recent days that Jan Suraaj could contest all the four seats, and that he hoped to get an electoral symbol soon.
A functionary with Jan Suraaj said: “We see the Assembly bypolls as a great opportunity to understand where and how we are placed. Since these seats are in Magadh and Shahabad regions, it could also be a good learning experience to understand the regional dynamics of Bihar politics.”
Anti-BJP parties attacked Kishor as soon as his intentions regarding contesting the bypolls became known. RJD leaders repeated their charge that Kishor is “the B-team of the BJP”, pointing out that the focus of Kishor’s attacks is the Lalu Prasad-led regional party. Kishor has more than once dismissed RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav as being nothing more than Lalu’s son.
Kishor has also accused Bihar Chief Minister and JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar of being “too dependent” on his bureaucrats. “If the Lalu Prasad-Rabri Devi regime was a case study of administrative jungle raj, Nitish Kumar’s regime is a case of bureaucratic jungle raj,” he said in Kaimur Tuesday.
On the BJP, Kishor’s stand is that it has let the RSS’s ideology “prevail over it”. During his padyatra, he has been reaching out to Muslim voters, asking them to come together with others to fight RSS ideology and defeat the BJP in the 2025 Assembly polls.
Kishor claims to be doing “different politics” than the established parties, asking people to vote for him on the plank of education and jobs, and appealing to them to move away from the lure of caste and religion. Invoking Bihar’s past as a centre of learning with the slogan of “Jay Bihar!” at his public meetings, the Jan Suraaj founder has also largely stayed away from populist promises, barring the recent assurance of fixed earnings through social media for one girl of each family.
“If you have a girl in your family who is conversant with social media, I can assure earnings of Rs 8,000-Rs 10,000 to each through social media and YouTube,” he said at a meeting.
Kishor first entered the political sphere as the founder and head of I-PAC, the political consultancy firm that worked on Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign to become prime minister. After that, I-PAC ran political campaigns of many parties, mostly achieving successful results.
Before he launched his own party, Kishor briefly joined the JD(U) and was appointed by a grateful Nitish, who returned to power in 2021, as the party vice-president.
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