Bihar proves too tough for Prashant Kishor

There are several lessons to be learnt from the rough and tumble of Bihar politics, and it is time for Prashant Kishor, the brand guru of political strategy, to learn a few.

Politics in Bihar is no Shakespearean drama; but no one can deny the complex twists and turns in its plots in this Hindi belt State, often called the cauldron of caste. Kishor, a new entrant into Bihar politics, objects seriously to typifying the State for its caste politics and goes on to cite how caste is a factor even in South India.

Although the great show, that is the 2025 Bihar Assembly election, may be nearly a year away, the results of the State’s Assembly byelection last month came as a dampener for Kishor’s newly floated party, Jan Suraaj. In the byelection, which was to be a barometer for the future of Kishor’s party, Jan Suraaj lost all four seats it contested; it even lost its deposit in three. The result reflects that power politics in Bihar is not everybody’s cup of tea. BJP won Ramgarh and Tarari; its ally Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)) won Belaganj; and Hindustani Awam Morcha won Imamganj.

Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) stood its ground in the 2024 Lok Sabha election as well as in the byelection, despite Kishor’s repeated assertions of that the Nitish era was over.

As for Kishor’s Jan Suraaj, the maximum number of votes a candidate got was around 37,000 in Imamganj, and the minimum was less than 6,000 in Tarari. In Ramgarh, Jan Suraaj’s Sushil Kumar Singh came in fourth, with 6,513 votes. BJP candidate Ashok Kumar Singh won this seat with 62,257 votes.

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In Belaganj, JD(U) candidate Manorama Devi won the election with 73,334 votes. Kishor fielded Mohammad Amjad here, who came in third with 17,285 votes.

So, is Bihar saying no to change? Can Bihar embrace a new party, with a new face and new narrative of development like the electorate in Delhi did in 2013, vesting its trust in the Aam Aadmi Party over the well-established Congress and BJP?

Bihar does have a history of elected national leaders with no caste connections in the Lok Sabha, be it Karnataka-born firebrand leader George Fernandes from Muzaffarpur (thrice between 1977 and 2004) or Maharashtra-born veteran socialist Madhu Limaye, who won four Lok Sabha elections from Munger and Banka in Bihar between 1964 and 1979.

A year before Punjab-born Inder Kumar Gujral, former Prime Minister, contested the Rajya Sabha election from Bihar in 1992, maverick Lalu Prasad had, in the 1991 Lok Sabha election, hilariously projected Gujral as a Gujjar Yadav from Punjab. “Gujral sahib Gujjar hain aur Gujjar ka matlab hota hai Punjabi Yadav. Yeh hamare khoon hain [Gujral sahib is a Gujjar and Gujjar means Punjabi Yadav. He is our kin],” Yadav had said while campaigning for Gujral from Patna. He had contested against former Union Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha, then a candidate from Chandrashekhar-led Samajwadi Janata Party.

So why cannot Kishor, who as an ace campaign strategist helped many parties and politicians, from Narendra Modi to Nitish Kumar and Mamata Banerjee to Captain Amarinder Singh, write his own success story, in his own State?

Bihar is not Delhi, of course. Kishor, unlike Arvind Kejriwal, had no initial push from a mass activist like Anna Hazare; there is no strong anti-incumbency against Nitish Kumar in Bihar like there was against the Congress nationally in 2013.

Caste factor

And the big C, the caste factor, in Bihar politics does remain a dominant reality. Even before Kishor could announce the formation of his political party (which he did with much panache on October 2, Gandhi’s birth anniversary), his rivals on social media said he had dropped his surname “Pandey” to denote that Kishor belongs to an upper caste.

Calling Kishor the “B-Team of BJP”, Lalu Prasad’s daughter Misa Bharti said, “Who is Prashant Kishor Pandey? Pandeys have this business of abusing Yadavs” seeking to push the upper caste versus OBC narrative.

INDIA coalition’s repeated call for a caste census has further shrunk the space for any party with an upper caste leader. Kishore realises this. It was a calculated move when he appointed a Madhubani-born Manoj Bharti, from the Dalit community, an IITian and former diplomat as the party’s working president when he officially launched his party.

On October 2, Kishor said that clues to the results of the 2025 Assembly election will lie in the November 2024 byelection for four seats in Bihar. But after the party’s poor performance in the byelection, rumblings have begun.

Former Union Minister Devendra Prasad Yadav and former MP Monazir Hassan, in whose presence the party was launched, resigned this week from the party’s core committee. Yadav, a five-term MP from Jhanjharpur, had quit Rashtriya Janata Dal to join Jan Suraaj, while Hassan, a former JDU leader and former MP from Begusarai, was in the political wilderness for some time.

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After the results, Kishor sparked controversy by describing Bihar as “literally a failed State”, at a virtual interaction with the Bihari diaspora in the US after launching the US chapter of his party. He compared Bihar to strife-ridden Sudan. “For example… sometimes we think… why are people in Sudan fighting for 20 years in a civil war? Because when you are in that failed state, people are not worried about how our children will study. They are worried about whom to shoot and where to capture. That is the situation in Bihar too,” he was reported by the media as saying so.

Kishor had made the bold promises of doing away with prohibition; he had announced that he would contest on all 243 seats in the 2025 Bihar Assembly election. The byelection results has no doubt come as jolt to his aspirations.

For the time being, Kishor’s political experiments seem to have run in the rough weather but the ace strategist is not the kind to give up. Only time will tell if Bihar is ready for a change.