Prashant Kishor’s victory in Bankipur in Patna, a seat the BJP had held for 31 years, and its president Nitin Nabin for 25 of those years, is a political development that will resonate in Bihar for years.
Is Bihar really on the cusp of change, or is Kishor’s win only a short-term reaction from the BJP’s core dominant-caste constituency, particularly Brahmins, who turned restive and joined the simmering anger of youth over exam paper leaks? Only time will tell.
Only months ago, Nabin won Bankipur by a margin of over 52,000 votes. The seat fell vacant when he was made party president and given a Rajya Sabha seat.
What happened in the few months that led to the BJP losing the seat by a margin of nearly 19,000 votes—even though Nabin himself campaigned extensively for the official BJP candidate, and even though Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhary was asked to treat this as a prestige seat—is the question everyone is asking.
Kishor’s win came at the right time; it was needed to keep the morale of his party workers up after Jan Suraaj polled only 3.34 per cent of the votes in the Assembly election last year, winning just 5 per cent of the votes in Bankipur itself. This time, Bankipur gave Kishor 10 times more votes. The JSP won in nearly 400 booths, an indication that it drew votes from all communities and breached party lines.
The defeat has come in the seat that was once the stronghold of the BJP’s national president, and there is no denying that it is a clear anti-BJP vote, but was this a vote for the JSP or for Kishor alone? That will be seen only in future by-elections, since the major Lok Sabha and Assembly elections are still some way off, in 2029 and 2030, respectively.
Coming just days after the massive Gen Z protest led by the Cockroach Janta Party movement at Jantar Mantar, whose echo reverberated in Patna, with students coming out in hordes, overcoming and even welcoming barricades, water cannons, and tear gas, the prevailing wisdom is that the Bankipur result shows Gen Z moving away from the BJP. Kishor, however, links his win to a larger shift in voting patterns across age groups and community lines. He has repeatedly said he does not believe it was the outcome of the Gen Z movement, perhaps to ensure the credit does not go elsewhere. He has also said he did not see large numbers of young voters in Bankipur, and that it was more a case of the BJP’s and RJD’s traditional voters looking for a new option.
Kishor termed the by-election a referendum on Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhary. He pointed out that Chaudhary was a selected Chief Minister, not an elected one, and has now been rejected.
A caste undertone, and more
Bilauti in Bhojpur is the village where Bharat Tiwari was killed in a police encounter on June 17 this year. The incident raised serious questions, since Tiwari had no criminal background. The Brahmin community and others from dominant castes have been seething at what they allege was a fake encounter, and they seem to have hit back at the ruling party. Kishor was among the first politicians to reach Bilauti.
Kishor is Brahmin, but his victory seemed to paper over caste differences. This is not new to Bihar, which has often voted for prominent personalities, going beyond the usual caste calculus.
The Karnataka-born George Fernandes was elected to the Lok Sabha from Bihar five times between 1977 and 2004, twice from Muzaffarpur and thrice from Nalanda. The Maharashtra-born socialist Madhu Limaye won from Munger and Banka four times between 1964 and 1979. The Punjab-born Inder Kumar Gujral, former Prime Minister of India, contested the Rajya Sabha election from Bihar in 1992 and won with Lalu Prasad by his side. Earlier, Gujral had also contested the 1991 Lok Sabha polls from Patna as a Janata Dal candidate, but the election was countermanded due to violence.
The CPI-ML MP from the Karakat Lok Sabha seat, Rajaram Singh, told Frontline that the most important thing about the Bankipur result is not the victory of any individual but the defeat of the BJP in a bastion it had dominated for three decades.
“This reflects the changing mood of the electorate. What happened in Bankipur in Bihar or Datia in Madhya Pradesh shows that youths have run out of patience with the BJP,” Singh said. “There are multiple reasons, but the protests by students at Jantar Mantar and the subsequent police action provided the immediate trigger. Bihar is a politically agile State. Patna University falls in the Bankipur area; students have protested against paper leaks there in the past, and there were massive protests during and after the Jantar Mantar protest as well. Since Prashant Kishor somehow became a central figure in this election, he is the beneficiary of the students’ anger. Even RJD supporters voted for a candidate they believed would defeat the BJP.”
The result also showed the impact of Nitish Kumar’s exit as Chief Minister at the BJP’s behest. “Nitish’s social base voted against the BJP. They did not like Nitish being dropped, and hence wanted to teach the BJP a lesson,” Singh said.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and BJP national president Nitin Nabin attend the National Democratic Alliance Parliamentary Party Meeting, “Mangal Milan,” at the G.M.C. Balayogi Auditorium, Parliament Library Building, in New Delhi on August 4, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
RAHUL SINGH/ANI
Interestingly, Lalu Prasad’s estranged son and Jan Shakti Janata Dal president Tej Pratap Yadav came out openly in support of Kishor days before the voting, hailing him as the “right candidate” and urging even the RJD candidate, Rekha Gupta, to extend her support to him.
The BJP, for its part, is downplaying the defeat. Senior leader and Union Minister Giriraj Singh described Kishor’s victory as “circumstantial”. He recalled that the NDA had lost 12 of 17 seats in the 2009 by-elections but had romped home with 202 seats in the 2010 Assembly election. Singh ruled out any long-term impact of Bankipur on the NDA’s prospects in Bihar.
Outside this political thrust and parry, Kishor is being cautious and measured. He seems to have learnt the difference between perception and reality the hard way—after 2025, when his party lost its deposit in 98 per cent of the seats it contested, and after the 2024 Assembly by-elections, its first trial in electoral politics, in which all four of its candidates lost.
Will Kishor be able to do what the actor Vijay did with his newly minted Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, winning the Tamil Nadu Assembly election in 2026 by defeating both the DMK and the AIADMK? Can he do an Arvind Kejriwal, who ended the Congress’ 15-year rule in Delhi in 2013? Vijay was aided by his fan clubs; Kejriwal owed his following to the 2011 India Against Corruption movement. But Kishor, or PK as he is known, is entirely on his own.
Or will Kishor remain the lone warrior from the JSP in the Bihar Assembly, somewhat like the three-term CPI-ML MLA from Bagodar in Jharkhand, Mahendra Singh, who was the most vocal anti-government voice between 1990 and 2005?
“People have decided to oust the BJP”
Senior Congress leader from Bihar Kishore Kumar Jha said Kishor’s overwhelming victory and the ruling party’s crushing defeat prove that people have decided to oust the BJP from power in Bihar. “Winning elections in the name of Modi is no guarantee now, after the student protests. The UGC equity regulations, the BPSC exam paper leaks, the student protests over the NEET paper leak, and the Cockroach Janta Party movement—all these together have played an important role in Prashant Kishor’s victory,” Jha said.
Jha also said the RJD had fielded a weak candidate and its top leaders did not campaign, and that the Congress too gave silent support to Kishor. “People in Bihar are fed up with the NDA government,” he said. “The Congress can be an alternative, but our party remains a supporter of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, which has low acceptability beyond its core Yadav base. So a large number of Congress voters also went with Prashant Kishor, including many who used to vote for the BJP in protest against the Congress alliance with the RJD.”
Jha reiterated that Samrat Chaudhary’s elevation as Chief Minister was a strong reason for the BJP’s defeat. Chaudhary, he said, was not liked either within his party or by Bihar’s educated class.
Police personnel use batons to disperse student protesters demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged NEET exam irregularities in Patna on July 22, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
SACHIN KUMAR/AFP
According to Jha, Bihar’s people, choked for the past 30 years on Mandir-Mandal politics, are now fed up with caste and communal politics and want an option. “That space is empty in Bihar, and the Congress can fill that vacuum if it does a different kind of politics. But if the Congress remains silent, as it did during the Bankipur polls, people will accept Jan Suraaj as that option. People in the Congress are tired of riding piggyback on the RJD; if the party makes up its mind to walk alone and tells the people it will fight alone in Bihar to solve their problems and work for the State’s betterment, only then will the Congress’ voter base increase.”
Kishor, for his part, has repeatedly maintained that the BJP’s boast of making India Congress-mukt (Congress-free) will not succeed. Some years ago, he tried to join the Congress, but seniors in the party’s Bihar unit are wary that he will want total control and leave no space for existing leaders.
Kishor’s journey
Born to a doctor, Shrikant Pandey, Kishor was born in Konar village in Rohtas in 1977. He did a stint with the UN in Chad, in north-central Africa, before forming Citizens for Accountable Governance, which he later converted into the electoral consultancy group, the Indian Political Action Committee.
He went on to draft the campaign strategy for Narendra Modi’s BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Then, after differences with Amit Shah, he turned to the JD(U)-RJD in the 2015 Bihar Assembly election, in which the BJP was roundly defeated. He later worked for the then Congress leader and Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh in the 2017 Punjab election; for the Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray; for the YSR Congress’s Jagan Mohan Reddy in 2019; the AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal in 2020; and the Trinamool Congress’s Mamata Banerjee in 2021.
In December 2018, he was appointed national vice-president of the JD(U), a month after joining Nitish Kumar’s party on September 16. But he quit soon after, as his meteoric rise to the No. 2 spot antagonised the party’s veteran leaders.
Kishor continued to dabble in politics before finally announcing he would quit his consultancy work entirely. He did this soon after drafting a campaign strategy for Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in the 2021 West Bengal election.
Four years later, Kishor launched his own party on October 2, 2022. The JSP flag carried pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar, and he made Manoj Kumar Bharti, a former Indian diplomat from the Dalit community, the party’s State president. Kishor launched a padayatra from Champaran, the site from which Gandhi led farmers against the indigo plantation system imposed by the British government. The padayatra covered over 5,000 kilometres across nearly 20 districts of Bihar, during which he appealed to people to vote for rozgar (employment) and not jaati (caste), and flagged the problem of young people migrating from Bihar to other States in search of jobs.
In the November 2024 by-elections to four Assembly seats, Kishor’s party polled 10 per cent of the votes but did not win a single seat, losing its deposit in three. The highest vote a JSP candidate got was around 37,000, in Imamganj. The lowest was under 6,000, in Tarari, where he had fielded the former Vice Chief of Army Staff Gen. Krishna Singh—one of only two Vice Chiefs of Army Staff from Bihar, the other being Gen. S.K. Sinha.
Some well-known leaders—the former Union Minister Devendra Prasad Yadav (a former RJD leader and five-term Lok Sabha MP from Muzaffarpur) and the former MP Monazir Hassan (a JD(U) leader and former Lok Sabha MP from Begusarai), in whose presence the JSP was launched—resigned from its core committee. Another high-profile leader, the former IPS officer-turned-politician Anand Mishra, who headed the JSP’s youth wing, quit in August 2025 and joined the BJP ahead of the Assembly election.
The students’ agitation in early 2025 against irregularities in the Bihar Public Service Commission examination let Kishor consolidate his party’s base among Bihar’s students and youth, but the Assembly election outcome months later was devastating. Kishor, who had blustered during the campaign, went incommunicado for days after the results were declared on November 14 last year.
Now, Kishor is circumspect, as he should be. He has downplayed questions about the possibility of him leading the Congress in Bihar or forging an alliance with regional leaders such as Chirag Paswan, making clear he has no immediate plans to enter into any such arrangement, with no significant election on the horizon until 2029. Instead, he has returned to his pet issues of rozgar (jobs) and palayan (migration), demanding that the NDA government in Bihar work to set up factories, reduce unemployment, and stop youth migration from the State.
While promising to release a blueprint next year to make Bankipur a city on par with other major cities, Kishor has underlined that it cannot become Bengaluru on the strength of one MLA.
Clearly, Kishor is looking at a long-term role. He is aware that the political course in a State like Bihar is difficult, where voters are divided into watertight compartments that cannot change overnight. In the past, he has organised a Bihar Badlav Yatra (Change Bihar March), but Kishor evidently understands that Bihar’s politics cannot be changed with yatras alone.
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