The unbridled assault on Brand Modi by Gen Z during the Jantar Mantar protest has had its first fallout in Bankipur in Bihar and Datia in Madhya Pradesh, two bypolls that the BJP had considered as having pocketed long before the elections. In fact, responding to criticism of its candidate selection in Bankipur, voices in the party had said that the BJP would win even if it fielded a cat or dog.
In the Bankipur Assembly seat, which fell vacant after its MP Nitin Nabin was made the BJP party president and became a Rajya Sabha member, Jan Suraj founder Prashant Kishor made a significant electoral debut, polling over 49 per cent votes. In Datia, the Congress veteran politician Ghanshyam Singh humbled the BJP’s Ashutosh Tiwari, a young BJP party worker.
Besides the obvious spillover of discontent from Jantar Mantar, there is another factor that the BJP appears to have underestimated. In these bypolls, the party was following an electoral strategy that its insiders refer to as the Gujarat model.
In September 2021, an unknown party leader named Bhupendra Patel replaced the late Vijay Rupani as Chief Minister of Gujarat in a stunning and successful experiment that the party then decided to carry forward beyond the western State that it dominates.
Since dubbed the Gujarat Model, the experiment involves forcing senior BJP leaders into political retirement and elevating lesser-known party workers into the top seat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Minister for Home Affairs Amit Shah are now exporting this model to other States.
In both Bankipur and Datia, the BJP was betting on booth-level leaders even as its veteran leaders indicated that they were ready and willing to play another innings. In Datia, Narottam Mishra, the former Madhya Pradesh Home Minister, a heavyweight seen as being close to Amit Shah, had been defeated in 2023 by the Congress’ Rajendra Bharti. After Bharti’s disqualification necessitated a bypoll, Mishra wanted to try his luck again. The BJP, however, picked a young unknown in Ashutosh Tiwari and sought Mishra’s help to pull off Tiwari’s win.
Similarly, in Bankipur, the BJP picked Neeraj Sinha, whose name people outside Bihar may have to Google, and banked on Nabin to help Sinha win the election. Both Tiwari and Sinha failed to make any significant impact from the day they filed their nominations. Nabin and Mishra gave a sense that they genuinely tried, but their efforts proved futile.
Alarm bells began ringing in the saffron camp within hours of the bypoll verdicts. The Gujarat model had cracked, party workers said. There is now a very real blowback from inside.
How the model came into being
After Modi the Chief Minister exited Gujarat politics to become the Prime Minister in 2014, the State saw a few key power centres emerge. As long as Anandiben Patel remained the Chief Minister, these satraps in the State unit maintained low profiles. Upon her exit in 2016, they slowly began to become visible. During Vijay Rupani’s term as Chief Minister (2016-2021), Nitinbhai Patel emerged as a parallel power centre.
BJP leader Narottam Mishra speaks to the media after the party denied a ticket for the Datia assembly bypoll, in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh on July 11, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
Within one year of Rupani’s tenure, the BJP was staring at the prospect of almost losing Gujarat in the 2017 Assembly election. The factional fighting within the party became a top concern. As Gujarat’s first Assembly election without Modi at the helm loomed, the BJP also ran into a major Patidar agitation, which spotlighted the economic backwardness of the electorally influential Patel community. In the end, Modi had to come down to Gujarat and slog it out, his intense campaign latching on to Mani Shanker Aiyer’s “Chaiwala’”remarks to rally the OBC vote base, while also stoking aspirational Gujaratis by riding a seaplane from the Sabarmati riverfront. The BJP won the election narrowly—99 seats against 77 for the Congress.
In the brainstorming that followed this less than reassuring victory, the party came up with a new script. Almost a year ahead of the 2022 Assembly election, Bhupendra Patel replaced Rupani, the entire old guard was sent out of power, and first-term MLAs were made Ministers. The BJP won big in 2022—156 seats against 17 for the Congress.
The BJP rolled out the Gujarat Model almost simultaneously in Delhi for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) election, in which it gained an extra 3 per cent votes. Although it was not enough to stop the AAP, the party took the vote share improvement as a positive mandate for the Gujarat Model.
Now encouraged, the BJP top brass began to go whole hog to end the rule of the State satraps. In Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh read the writing on the wall and found himself a position with a lower profile, unlike in Rajasthan, where the combative Vasundhara Raje lost the plot. Both Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Manohar Lal Khattar exited Madhya Pradesh and Haryana respectively to serve the Modi Cabinet at the Centre.
As the BJP approached the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the message within the party seemed sharp: the 70s age group, with notable exceptions, would be sent into political retirement. Some senior leaders adjusted by finding places for their sons and daughters; others began to nurse wounds, waiting for an opportunity to strike.
A police encounter that tipped the scales
The Bhojpur region, an hour away from Patna, is known as the land of rebels in Bihar. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Arrah in Bhojpur ducked the Modi wave, with CPI (ML) leader Sudama Prasad winning the seat. Ahead of the 2025 Assembly election in Bihar, the former Union Minister R.K. Singh, while being a BJP leader, levelled serious corruption allegations against the then Bihar chieftain Nitish Kumar.
Then, in June 2026, the region shot into the limelight again, when a 28-year-old youth named Bharat Tiwari was killed in an alleged police encounter. The old guards in the State BJP unit, forced into retirement, turned active. Ashwini Choubey, a former Union Minister, called the killing a “pre-planned murder”.
The law-and-order situation in Bihar had already been fragile. The Tiwari death turned the heat on Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary, who also holds the Home portfolio. His appointment to the top post had already been seen as an imposition of top-down decision-making from the BJP top brass. Choudhary had come into the BJP after quitting the Rashtriya Janata Dal, where his father Shakuni Choudhary was a key associate of Lalu Prasad Yadav.
Choudhary did not have any RSS pedigree either. But Bihar has for decades been a key State of interest for the RSS. Mohan Bhagwat, the incumbent RSS chief, previously served as the organisation’s Bihar head.
Unlike Gujarat, where BJP leaders fully aligned themselves with the vision of the top brass to promote party workers and young faces, the Bihar unit has entrenched leaders who have now become restive. Not only were they being pushed into retirement, but even their children were not getting chances on the premise that Modi did not want dynastic politics.
The Bharat Tiwari killing became a trigger for these wounded workers to create a tide against Samrat Choudhary, knowing full well that they had nothing to lose. One senior Bihar-based BJP leader, requesting anonymity, said: “Samrat Choudhary was not the natural choice for the post of Bihar CM. The BJP top brass erred in judgment. They did not decipher Bihar’s caste dynamics. The top brass decided on Choudhary solely on caste considerations. In this, they hurt the people. The BJP in Bihar is now being called a party of semi-literates. There were better choices and the BJP leadership should not have decided on the CM face solely on caste considerations.”
The Datia fallout
At the age of 66, Mishra faces an uncertain political future, and retirement may seem all too real for him. As Home Minister in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan cabinet in Madhya Pradesh, Mishra’s ego was bloated. He was regularly projected as an alternative for the top job. In addition, his image grew larger after he became known as a confidante of Amit Shah. Mishra ordered bulldozer actions against alleged encroachments and hit the headlines regularly. He had now acquired the image of a tough leader.
The killing of Bharat Tiwari raised questions around the appointment of Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary
| Photo Credit:
Aftab Alam Siddiqui/ANI
When Shah was the BJP president (2014-19), Mishra was used for election work in Uttar Pradesh on a large scale, his task being to consolidate the Brahmin vote base. Seen as a muscular and tough taskmaster, Mishra’s profile began to grow beyond Madhya Pradesh. With Shah emerging as an extremely powerful No. 2 in the Modi government while almost entirely running the BJP’s party affairs, Mishra had hoped to see his political career bloom.
Then Mishra lost the 2023 Assembly election in Datia. Chouhan’s CM baton was passed on to another ‘Gujarat Model’ find, Mohan Yadav, arguably not known beyond Indore but with an age and caste profile that appealed to the BJP top brass. Mishra deciphered the new Cabinet in Madhya Pradesh, as well as in other BJP-ruled States, to understand that while the 70s seemed to be retirement age in national politics, it was the 60s in State politics.
In fact, the BJP seemed to be sending out a message that the desired age bracket for Chief Ministers was now the 50s. Mohan Yadav, Bhajanlal Sharma, Nayab Singh Saini, and Mohan Charan Majhi were made Chief Ministers of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Odisha, respectively, while in their 50s.
Unlike others, however, Mishra left nobody in doubt that he was not impressed with the export of the Gujarat Model to an Assembly constituency in Madhya Pradesh. His supporters caused a multi-district traffic jam after he was denied the Datia byelection ticket. Mishra was summoned to New Delhi, and upon returning announced his support to the young replacement candidate. But his public shedding of tears sent a louder message to his support base. Stories from Datia’s streets now talk of how the Congress gained a windfall from the BJP’s traditional vote base.
Model under test
The reversals in Bankipur and Datia appear to send out a common verdict against the BJP’s leadership. Its strong-arm tactics went unchallenged as long as Brand Modi seemed strong. It also remained strong as long as Shah’s electoral acumen looked infallible. But the open and undiluted mocking and dismantling of Brand Modi at Jantar Mantar have been as revealing for the common people as for BJP leaders who were in awe of the larger-than-life persona of the Prime Minister. A section of BJP leaders now reads Shah’s handling of the Jantar Mantar protest as a sign of his raw administrative and political acumen. They are no longer able to picture Modi and Shah in the frame of the past.
For these leaders, the strike on senior leaders is seen as a browbeating measure that threatens their future. This section of the BJP leaders has also begun to believe that the Gujarat Model is selective and subjective, with exceptions granted to a few. In Bankipur and Datia, the BJP faced a reality test for extending the Gujarat Model across the country. It failed the test.
Manish Anand is a senior Delhi-based journalist, who has covered the BJP, the RSS, and the PMO for over two decades.
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