Election strategist turned activist Prashant Kishor predicts a ‘doom’ for Nitish Kumar and the ‘rise’ of Narendra Modi in the 2024 Lok elections.
The 47 year- old with a unique distinction to strategise the elections of both Nitish and Modi apart from several other top leaders from their war-rooms, has morphed him into a ‘padyatri (footslogger)’, carrying out his ‘Jan Suraj Abhiyan (good governance campaign)’ at the grassroots level in Bihar for the last 17 months.
Of late, he has become a toast of varied news outlets giving interviews and assessing and predicting the prospects of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vis-a-vis others in the coming general elections. In his assessment of Bihar’s context, the chief minister and his Janata Dal (United) will be doomed beyond redemption and the Prime Minister will hold his forte after the polls.
“Nitish and his party have no future beyond the Lok Sabha polls. The BJP swallowed him by hugging him back in 2017. Now, he is left only with his skeleton. The BJP will carry his skeleton for whatever use it has till the Lok Sabha elections. After that, he (Nitish) will be done and dusted. They (BJP) are smart enough to deal with such type of leaders,” Kishore said in a question-answer session at the event of a national daily of India.
The logic behind Kishore’s claim is Modi’s larger-than-life persona, of which “Ram, Hindutva, nationalism and welfare-ism are subservient to”, will drive the voters to vote for the BJP, propelling its prospects in the polls and Nitish’s party could benefit out of it in terms of a few seats. “But the BJP will have to pay a heavy price for carrying him along in the 2025 assembly elections”.
Now, the question is: Is Modi’s personality so attractive and Nitish’s so repulsive? Will the voters vote for Modi, carrying extreme detest for Nitish in their minds and hearts? Is Modi so lovable and Nitish so detestable? Will the amorphous voters be so precise and accurate in preferring Modi and overlooking Nitish? The JDU and the BJP had shared 17 seats each in 2019. By all accounts, the JDU will get the lion’s share among other National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners in Bihar.
It’s a fact that Prashant Kishor has plausible experience of working at the war-rooms of the “who’s who” of Indian political panorama and as well as interacting with the cross-sections of the people at the grassroots level. He is supposed to have reasonable acumen to assess and predict the polls. What might be adding to the credence of his assessment and Modi’s claim of taking his alliance’s tally to “400-paar (beyond 400)” is the BJP’s stupendous performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha in which it improved from 283 in 2014 to 303.
Post-2019
But Modi’s claim and Kishor’s observations don’t appear to factor in the developments that have taken place after 2019. The first and foremost development in Bihar’s context is the emergence of Tejashwi Yadav, making employment, on which Modi has decidedly failed, the central weapon against the Hindutva party.
That it proved to be a potent weapon became evident when he led his Rashtriya Janata Dal’s emergence as the single largest party with 79 MLAs in the face of the combined might of the BJP and the JDU in the 2020 assembly polls. Of course, the biggest casualty of Tejashwi’s rise was Nitish’s party which was reduced to 42 MLAs. But the BJP was not unscathed as it with its 75 MLAs got barely eight seats more than Mahagathbandhan’s 114 to form the government with Tejashwi missing the chance by a whisker.
And, it is unwise to say that Tejaswhi succeeded simply because it was a state election. The PM had addressed 32 meetings, attacking Tejaswhi and ridiculing his father Lalu Prasad Yadav – in jail at that time – for promoting his progeny in politics. But the voters, evidently, believed Tejashwi more than Modi and Nitish and voted for the Tejashwi-led alliance. The NDA had got only 1,2000 votes more than that of the Mahagathbandhan in 2020.
Photo: X/@yadavtejashwi.
Tejaswhi had announced that he would give 10 lakh jobs if he was voted to power in 2020. He added credence to his claim after Nitish joined the Mahagathbandhan in August 2022 and Tejaswhi became his deputy by making the CM hand about 4.50 lakh jobs during the seventeen months of their tenure together in office. The mammoth crowd of the youths at his recently concluded Jan Vishwash Yatra that culminated at the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) rally at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan on March 3 amply reflected the hope and excitement of the youths. It might not be easy for Modi who had specifically claimed to give two crore jobs annually at his several meetings in the previous elections to outclass Tejaswhi among the unemployed youths.
Moreover, the opposition might not be as strong in terms of the control over the resources, institutions and media narrative as the BJP is. But it’s not as disarrayed as it was in 2019 either in Bihar or in the rest of the country. While the RJD-Congress-Left has a well-knit alliance in the state, the INDIA bloc has beefed up its strength by striking alliances in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
Kishor versus Tejashwi
Be it because of ‘strategic reasons’ or his genuine feelings, Prashant Kishor whose Jan Suraj Abhiyan is an absentee player in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and focuses on the 2025 assembly elections, dismisses Tejaswhi as a “9th class fail who owes his existence in politics because of his promotion and pampering by his father”.
While Kishor enumerates Modi’s “unmatched” strength in terms of Hindutva, nationalism, welfare-ism and cadre base, he says that Tejaswhi won’t be a factor in 2025 polls because “he has no contributions to show on his own and carries the baggage of ‘jungle raaj’ during his father’s era”.
Will the voters act in the manner Kishore is explaining?
Despite Kishor’s analysis and the BJP’s bravado, one will have to wait for the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the subsequent assembly elections to figure out the developments post-2019 and how the amorphous voters divided into multiple layers of as diverse a country as India has reacted to ever-evolving socio-political phenomena.
Nalin Verma is a senior journalist, author, media educator, and independent researcher in folklore.
