Did youth protests drive Prashant Kishor’s bye-poll win in Bihar?

Did youth protests drive Prashant Kishor’s bye-poll win in Bihar?

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Election strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor’s victory in the bye-election in Bihar’s Bankipur Assembly constituency on Monday came as a surprise to many, given that the Bharatiya Janata Party had held the seat for more than three decades. Kishor defeated the candidate from the Hindutva party by over 19,000 votes.

Less than nine months ago, during the Assembly polls, the candidate from Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party finished a distant third in Bankipur. Nitin Nabin had won this seat for a fifth consecutive time. The bye-election became necessary because Nabin, who is now the BJP’s national president, moved to the Rajya Sabha.

When the bye-election was announced, Kishor, whose decision to not contest the Assembly polls himself had been criticised by his supporters, was first to throw his hat in the ring.

On the campaign trail, Kishor trained his guns on the BJP, questioning its choice of chief minister and accusing it of betraying the mandate it had been given by Bihar’s voters. He pitched the contest in Bankipur as a “referendum” on the BJP’s decision to put party member Samrat Choudhary in the chief minister’s chair in April, easing out long-term ally, Nitish Kumar, of the Janata Dal (United).

The result on Monday is likely to provide a fillip to Kishor’s party, which had failed to make a mark in the Assembly elections. Political observers told Scroll that Kishor had benefited from the recent youth protests that began in Delhi but eventually reached Bihar too. They suggested that his party could even emerge as the BJP’s principal opponent in Bihar, replacing the Rashtriya Janata Dal.

Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary’s social media post congratulating Prashant Kishor for his victory in Bankipur, Bihar.

Focused campaign

In November, even though the Jan Suraaj Party finished with a 3.3% vote share in the Assembly elections, it did not manage to win any seats. After the elections, Kishor came under fire because his repeated claims that Nitish Kumar’s political career was nearing its end did not seem to bear out: the Janata Dal (United) veteran took oath as chief minister for a record tenth time.

However, political space opened up for Kishor in April when Kumar suddenly stepped down and Bihar got its first chief minister from the BJP. The change of guard allowed Kishor to claim that he was right about Kumar’s political future all along.

Even before the BJP made Samrat Choudhary the chief minister, Kishor had been criticising him for his purportedly dubious educational qualifications and his alleged criminal background. After Choudhary was elevated to the post, Kishor’s attacks grew sharper.

Unlike in the Assembly elections, during the campaign for the Bankipur bye-poll, Kishor focused solely on the BJP. Neither the Janata Dal (United) nor the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the principal Opposition outfit in Bihar, featured in his messaging prominently.

Prashant Kishor addressing a public meeting in Bankipur, Bihar. Credit: @jansuraajonline/X

Gen Z impact

The composition of the electorate in Bankipur appears to have helped him as well. The constituency is located in the heart of Patna and upper-caste groups such as Kayasthas and Banias make up a sizeable chunk of the voting population.

While these communities typically vote for the BJP, Kishor’s image as a “new” and “meritocratic” leader appealed to them, contended the political scientist Ashwani Kumar, who hails from Bihar and has authored a book titled Community Warriors: State, Peasants, and Caste Armies in Bihar.

“You can find a UPSC [Union Public Service Commission] candidate in every second or third house of Bankipur and retired ambassadors, bureaucrats live there,” Kumar said. “They used to associate the ideas of sushasan [good governance] and naya Bihar [new Bihar] with Nitish Kumar. Now they are seeing that possibility in Prashant Kishor.”

The political scientist surmised that the youth protests that also played out in Bihar had a part in Kishor’s victory.

The Jan Suraaj Party founder had come out in support of the protesters after July 20, when the Delhi Police had clamped down heavily on the Cockroach Janta Party’s march to Parliament. “The people of Bankipur will respond [to police brutality in Delhi] with their vote and tell the BJP that we are a democracy,” he had said then.

Pushpendra Kumar, a Patna-based social scientist and vice president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, brought up the youth protests as well.

“The Gen Z movement and police brutality against student protests created an environment,” he contended. “There was a feeling even among the core voters of the BJP that the party has become too arrogant and needs an occasional drubbing.”

Caste factor

Kumar also cited the controversial killing of Bharat Bhushan Tiwari, an upper-caste youth from Bihar’s Bhojpur, in a police encounter in June as one of the factors driving discontent in BJP’s upper-caste support base. Kishor had visited Tiwari’s village and blamed senior officials in the state government for the killing.

Throughout his campaign, he directly addressed upper-caste voters, asking them not to cast their ballots as if they were the BJP’s “bonded labourers”.

He also accused the Hindutva party of “insulting” Hinduism for the manner in which it invoked Hindu gods in its political rallies.

At a public meeting in July, Kishor made a reference to a BJP event in Lucknow. “They made Lord Hanuman dance in their roadshow with a BJP flag in his hand,” he said. “They have become so arrogant that they were sitting on a chariot while Lord Hanuman was dancing.”

A video from the roadshow that Prashant Kishor was referring to. Credit: @news24tvchannel/X

For its part, the BJP party bungled the campaign by first nominating a candidate who backed out of the contest and later picking 32-year-old political lightweight Neeraj Kumar, who was seen as no match for Kishor.

The Jan Suraaj Party founder framed the BJP’s decision to field a relatively unknown from the seat as proof of its purported arrogance and overconfidence about winning.

On Monday, Kishor once again took a swipe at the Hindutva party while speaking about his performance. “The people of Bankipur have delivered a message to the leadership of the BJP: make a good man the chief minister of Bihar instead of Samrat Choudhary,” he told reporters in Patna.

Bihar’s Vijay?

Ashwani Kumar, the political scientist, argued that the victory in the bye-election would further establish Kishor as a key Opposition figure in the state’s politics. In fact, he went so far as to compare him to the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Vijay.

“He, too, enjoys celebrity status and people recognise his name all over Bihar,” Kumar said. “He is talked about in almost every home of the state. People know that he used to work with Modi.”

He pointed out that though the Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav was younger than Kishor, he did not have the same appeal among voters because of the decades-old accusations of Yadav domination against his party.

Pushpendra Kumar, the social scientist, also held that the Rashtriya Janata Dal would be “the net loser in the long run”. However, he was wary of reading too much into the bye-election verdict.

“Prashant Kishor and his party have got a fresh lease of life,” he said. “But the next election is far away.”



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