Dear readers,
Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) is slowly making noises in the rough and tumble of Bihar’s politics. But will that be enough to script an alternative politics in the agrarian State where caste is cast in stone and the veterans of socialist politics—Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar—still call the shots? Not to mention the resurgent BJP.
Of course, one can argue that both Lalu and Nitish are past their prime, and the third person in the troika, Ram Vilas Paswan, is no more. But the fact remains that Lalu has ensured a smooth transition of power to his son Tejashwi Yadav in the Rashtriya Janata Dal while Chirag Paswan has firmly established his grip on his father’s Lok Janshakti Party. Nitish Kumar, who was written off by Prashant Kishor (also called PK), came back with a bang in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, and his party, the Janata Dal (United) or JD(U), still has a strong base among the intermediary classes.
Meanwhile, Kishor’s JSP has a party flag with pictures of both Gandhi and Ambedkar and was launched on October 2, Gandhi’s birth anniversary. In 2022, on the same day, PK launched a padayatra from Champaran, the site from where Gandhi had led farmers on a protest against the forced indigo plantation imposed by the British government.
Besides promising top priority to education and employment and to lift the ban on prohibition, PK attacks caste politics. But at the same time, he promises to go by the findings of the caste survey (carried out by the Nitish Kumar government) and assures due representation to the 36 per cent Extremely Backward Classes (read: non-Yadav OBCs). He even goes to the extent of adopting the tagline “Jiski jitni aabadi, uski utni hissedari” (representation in proportion to population), a slogan now being pushed by nearly all parties and first popularised by Bahujan Samaj Party founder Kanshi Ram as “Jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski utni hissedari”.
Kishor, son of Shrikant Pandey, a doctor, was born in Konar village in Rohtas in 1977. He did a stint with the UN in Chad in north-central Africa before forming the Citizens for Accountable Governance, which he later converted into the Indian Political Action Committee.
After successfully crafting the campaign strategy for Narendra Modi’s BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, PK delivered for the JD(U) in the 2015 Bihar Assembly election, for the Congress’ Captain Amarinder Singh in the 2017 Punjab election, for the Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray and the YSR Congress’ Jagan Mohan Reddy in 2019, the AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal in 2020, and the Trinamool Congress’ Mamata Banerjee in 2022.
In December 2018, he was appointed national vice president of JD(U), exactly a month after he joined the Nitish Kumar-led party on September 16. But his meteoric rise to JD(U)’s No.2 man was short-lived and he quit. He then tried to join the Congress in 2022 but that failed because the party did not accept his terms. Now, he has started his own party.
PK, therefore, has no direct experience in electoral politics, but his supporters fiercely contest this. They point to his decade-long career as a political strategist and his having worked with political parties of all hues. They say he is a campaign genius who understands everything about political campaigning—from technology to branding. Despite these arguments, the fact remains that it is particularly tough to make a mark in a State where legacy counts and where trying to pitch a theme outside social coalitions is like selling a comb to a bald man.
Bihar’s next Assembly election is due in 2025. PK is testing the waters by fielding candidates for all four Assembly seats where byelections will be held in November 2024.
On October 16, Kishor named the former Vice Chief of Army Staff Lt Gen. Krishna Singh as his candidate from the Tarari seat, projecting his candidature as a matter of pride for Bihar as Singh is one of the two Vice Chiefs of Army Staff from Bihar (the other being S.K. Sinha) till date. “I am fulfilling my promise that everyone fighting the election as a Jan Suraaj candidate will be a ‘Bihar ka lal’ (son of Bihar) and will be more capable than me,” PK said.
In the last few months, people from politics, academics, media, and the armed forces have joined the new party. Manoj Bharti, the party’s working president, is a retired diplomat, who has served as an envoy to four countries.
While the JSP has some similarities with the AAP, there are some striking dissimilarities as well. While Arvind Kejriwal owed his strength to the 2011 Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement at New Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, PK is entirely on his own. There are serious doubts that Kishor, the election strategist, will be able to do in Bihar’s countryside what Kejriwal could do in Delhi with its primarily urban population. It is significant that leaving aside issues like corruption or caste, Kishor is repeatedly invoking State pride, akin to what his bete noire Nitish Kumar had done to the hilt with his “Bihari Pride” campaign in the 2010 Assembly election. Later, Chirag Paswan came up with the tagline “Bihar first, Bihari first”.
Moreover, even Nitish and Chirag could not do well in elections without an alliance with a formidable party. PK is staying independent. But 2025 is still far. And he may yet make some course corrections.
My own sentiment towards this new political party in Bihar is somewhat close to what American actor F. Murray Abraham once said: ”I’m passionate about politics, but when it comes to political parties, I’m despondent.”
Watch this space to see if my despondency is justified. And write in with your views on Prashant Kishor and his new political baby.
Until then,
Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline
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