Bihar was a turning point in politics when Prashant Kishor won the Bankipur bypoll and destroyed what was widely considered to be the bastion of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Ending the party’s thirty-five-year dominance over one of its most secure voters, the Jan Suraaj founder delivered the blow that went far beyond the local electoral map. The high-stakes contest that was triggered by the resignation of the existing leadership prior to the elevation to the upper house of parliament turned into a hard prestige struggle as the urban electorate emerged as a target.
Kishor engaged in a robust grassroots campaign, with mass public engagement, targeted door-to-door campaigning and targeted booth-based mobilization throughout the campaign. The Jan Suraaj campaign did away with conventional rhetoric and framed the election as a referendum on governance, and instead focused on key issues such as employment generation, educational reform and structural reform; and worked hard to appeal to a significant number of first-time and Gen Z voters.
As it knew that this seat was in danger of being under attack from the ruling party in the future it launched a major campaign and made use of its enormous number of stars and its thousands of dedicated party workers to defend the seat. Even with the political weight and resources at his disposal, Kishor was able to take a commanding position and remained one in the end of thirty-two rounds of counting. He got a commanding share of the electorate in the final results with more than sixty-four thousand votes, far ahead of his nearest rival from BJP by a margin of over nineteen thousand votes.
In an odd yet striking addition to the electoral scene, it also featured independent candidates with the exact namesakes of two of Bihar’s most powerful politicians, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar. In the end these names had no impact on the result, only double-digit vote counts, but media observers took the victory to be a little bizarre. But in the end, the story of the Bankipur bypoll was Jan Suraaj emerging as a viable political force, which could change the political landscape in the state at large because the new party started to take off.
