On Bihar's Streets, the Prashant Kishor Phenomenon Slowly Takes Shape

Standing next to their cars under a peepal tree on Patna’s Bailey Road, a group of men discuss a name that has not left their lips for weeks: Prashant Kishor. “Kamal ka neta hai. Sabka hawa tight kiye hua hai.” (He’s a hell of a leader. He’s got everyone sweating.)

More than in the corridors of parliament or state assemblies, the stories of political leaders unroll on such city streets, if not on the gravel pathways of villages. Kishor’s is such a story, still in the making in Bihar.

Unlike general elections and assembly elections, elections for state legislative councils – which exist only in six states, including Bihar, involve a select classes of voters – hardly create the euphoria that other polls generate. But the upcoming Bihar Legislative Council election for eight seats are a subject of discussion because Kishor’s Jan Suraaj party has plunged into the fray.

His party’s candidates are occupying far bigger spaces than their counterparts from the Bharatiya Janata Party, Janata Dal (United), Rashtriya Janata Dal and others in the ubiquitous local social-media channels and TV screens. It’s perhaps not because his candidates were likely to win or lose. It is because Kishor fetches more eyeballs and that is the key to the survival and sustenance of internet-based channels.

What we know, for now, is that Kishor is distinct from many other leaders who have made their mark in Bihar. For one, in a state where strong statements and accusations are an everyday affair for political leaders, his words are often carefully measured for impact.

Dissent is the lifeblood of political leaders in Bihar, who take on both rivals and their own party bosses with equal aplomb. Kishor's carefully worded statements about Prime Minister Narendra Modi or even Union home minister Amit Shah, whose development model and political strategies he otherwise regularly criticises, strike a markedly contrarian and perhaps even dissonant note in this context.

In this sense, Bihar's voters will be right to wonder if Kishor truly is the man to take on the establishment, but for now, a lot is being discounted as his tactical approach to politics and power. Perhaps he believes his measured tone will set him apart from the rest of the opposition, but only time will tell if it is a strategy that actually works in his favour.

Indeed some of his statements, when viewed fleetingly on mobile phone screens, can appear to make illusory claims. But Kishor the phenomenon is still real. The 49-year-old stunned the BJP by defeating it in Patna’s Bankipur Assembly constituency – the saffron outfit’s emerging “Hindutva laboratory” and its safe bastion for over three decades.

Also read: Rampage in Datia, Stunned in Bankipur: BJP's Bypoll Picks Spark Turmoil

It is not that the Jan Suraaj Party came out of nowhere and won the Bankipur seat in the July 2026 bypoll. He toiled hard for close to three years in the hinterland of Bihar. He walked on foot through the length and breadth of Bihar’s hinterlands. He heard people and shared a “formula” to liberate them from poverty, unemployment and the curse of distress migration.

Though his party, which he formed in the course of his yatra through the state, contested 238 of Bihar’s 243 seats in the 2025 assembly election, it lost massively. Its candidates forfeited their security deposits on almost every seat. But what, perhaps, distinguished Prashant from others was his decision to stay the course despite the debacle.

Instead of fleeing the field, bruised and battered, he stood firm in the arena. And, showing the characteristics of a valiant fighter, he threw his hat into the ring at Bankipur, in the end upsetting the applecart of the BJP’s Nitin Nabin, defeating him on a seat he had won from since 2006. (His late father, Nabin Kishor Prasad Sinha, had first won the then Patna West seat in 1995.)

Bihar’s background

The politically fertile soil of Bihar has a history of producing new leaders. Former chief minister and Lalu Prasad Yadav was one of them. He was born in an extremely poor family in Gopalganj district in the 1950s and rose to become one of the tallest leaders on the Indian political horizon in the 1990s.

“Jab tak rahega samosa mein aalu, tab tak rahega Bihar mein Lalu.” (As long as samosas have potatoes, Lalu rules Bihar”) was a popular phrase denoting the longevity of Lalu in Bihar.

Though Narendra Modi is not Bihari, the state’s voters accepted him with open arms in 2014 when he came from Gujarat appealed to them to make him the prime minister. Nitish Kumar, who served as Bihar’s chief minister for the longest tenure, was known more for his administrative skills and social engineering than for the charisma that Lalu had.

Can Prashant Kishor’s emergence be equated with that of Lalu? Does there exist a parallel between him and Modi? Some observers fancy a parallel between him and Arvind Kejriwal. But it’s too simplistic to compare Prashant with Kejriwal. What are Prashant’s phenomena?

A close interaction with people watching Bihar’s politics for quite some time reveals that Prashant has “newness” laced with modernity in his operations. It’s still too early and near-foolhardy to predict his long-term prospects and trajectory – but he is in many ways different from others whom Bihar has witnessed and tested so far.

Prashant’s newness

Noted economist and professor at Shiv Nadar University, Rajat Kathuria, wrote in an incisive column on public services and electoral choices in the Indian Express (September 21), “A constituency can contain thousands of parents unhappy with its schools without education becoming electorally decisive if no serious candidate chooses to compete on school performance. The existence of a grievance doesn’t automatically create a political market for its solution.”

Professor Kathuria highlighted the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) gaining significance after it drew attention to paper leaks in competitive examinations, an issue he said was not “as narrow as it may appear”.

In professor Kathuria’s column, though written in another context, one sees the symmetry between Prashant Kishore’s politics and the CJP – they raise similar issues.

Also read: Through Samrat Choudhary, Prashant Kishor Takes Aim at Amit Shah and Hindutva Politics

Quality primary education has been at the top of Prashant’s agenda from the beginning of its operations in the state. The first thing he has promised to his constituents after winning Bankipur is to ensure quality education for the children of all of them at his party’s expense.

“Within a year I will work assiduously to improve the primary and middle schools in Bankipur in coordination with the authorities concerned. If it doesn’t happen, my party will enrol the students in private schools, bearing the cost. This arrangement will be replicated at the state level once there is a system of Jan Suraaj in place.” And he seems to be working at it with all the strength at his command.

Thus Prashant Kishore has chosen to prioritize the issues which so far other political parties had ignored or thought unimportant in terms of electoral gains. He systematically and relentlessly attacks Modi for using the “distressed migrants” from Bihar to boost the prospects and productivity of Gujarat, and he attacks Lalu and Nitish with equal vigour for paying lip service to quality education, which according to him “holds the panacea to cure all ills of the state”.

Bihar can needs to live up to its “Gyan ki Bhoomi” (Land of Knowledge) image from its past.

It’s still too premature to predict the electoral future of Prashant Kishore, but his “newness” is distinct and almost incomparable to other political players. Moreover, as some senior bureaucrats in the state confided to this writer: “He is a highly knowledgeable leader. He knows what he is doing and he also knows what we are supposed to do. So we respect him and relish talking to him,” a secretary-level IAS officer told this writer during a recent visit to Patna.

(Nalin Verma is a journalist, author, folklorist and educator.)

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